NEWSLETTER

The International Mire Conservation Group (IMCG) is an international network of specialists having a particular interest in mire and peatland conservation. The network encompasses a wide spectrum of expertise and interests, from research scientists to consultants, government agency specialists to peatland site managers. It operates largely through e-mail and newsletters, and holds regular workshops and symposia. For more information: consult the IMCG Website: http://www.imcg.net

IMCG has a Main Board of 15 people from various parts of the world that has to take decisions between congresses. Of these 15 an elected 5 constitute the IMCG Executive Committee that handles day-to-day affairs. The Executive Committee consists of a Chairman (Jennie Whinam), a Secretary General (Hans Joosten), a Treasurer (Philippe Julve), and 2 additional members (Tatiana Minaeva, Piet-Louis Grundling).

Viktor Masing (†), Hugo Sjörs, and Richard Lindsay have been awarded honorary membership of IMCG.

Editorial

Maybe it is better to enumerate what this Newsletter does NOT contain: you will NOT find information on how exactly peatlands were brought into the Ramsar CoP9 resolutions, NOT on the growing perspectives of peatland conservation and wise use in Africa, NOT on the recent meetings of the Biodiversity Convention and the Kyoto Protocol in Montreal this month, NOT on the peatland orientated interventions there, NOT on the discussions that the UNFCCC AFOLU (Agriculture, Forest & other Land uses) expert group had this month in Sydney on how to include wetland and peatland as a land use category with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, and NOT on a whole lot of other peatland developments, projects, and literature. All these issues have to wait until the next Newsletter.

What this Newsletter holds, you can see in the table of contents below.

And what this Newsletter also contains are our best wishes to you all: for a happy 2006, in which we hope to meet you all again, in the field, in the world wide web, in our joint efforts to contribute to the conservation and wise use of peatlands worldwide.

Please send all your proposals, discussion contributions, news, publications, etc. to us, and with your help we will again prepare an interesting Newsletter. Deadline for the next Newsletter is 29 March 2006.

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: 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