The second Newsletter of 2004, only 2 months after the first one, but the constitution forces us to send out the final agenda for a General Assembly at least four months before the happening. In this Newsletter you will find already some documents for this Assembly, other documents will follow in the Newsletter that we will send out in the beginning of July.

To involve yourself in the discussions for the General Assembly, we ask you to study the documents and to send in reactions, amendments, notes, and points of discussion, to submit resolutions, and to candidate for the Main Board. But all this has to be done before July 5^th, when we will prepare the next Newsletter.

Not only IMCG has its major meeting in 2004: the International Peat Society organises its International Peat Congress, in June, in Tampere (Finland) where almost 600 peat people will meet. This Newsletter includes some deliberations on the proposed new structure of IPS: to reorganise the activities of the present eight commissions into two Committees, an “industrial” and a “scientific” Committee. Will this be a positive development or is IPS simply going give in to the already existing dominance of the peat extraction lobby?

Please send all your proposals, contributions, news, publications, etc. to us, and with your help we will again prepare an interesting Newsletter.

For information or other things, contact us at the IMCG Secretariat. Address updates should be sent to Jan Sliva (sliva@wzw.tum.de). In the meantime, keep an eye on the continuously refreshed and refreshing IMCG web-site, where we will also install a special corner with contributions for the General Assembly: http://www.imcg.net

John Couwenberg & Hans Joosten, The IMCG Secretariat

Botanical Institute, Grimmerstr. 88, D-17487 Greifswald (Germany)

fax: +49 3834 864114; e-mail: joosten@uni-greifswald.de