This Newsletter contains the first preparations for this year’s IMCG General Assembly in Finland . In the coming months we will organize the discussions on important decisions to be taken there. As we again want to discuss and vote per mail, to enable all IMCG members to participate, it is important to send in your contributions (including nominations for the Main Board) to the Secretariat before July 1 ^st 2006. Furthermore this Newsletter gives additional information of the field excursion in the weeks before the Conference. Have you already registered for the Conference?

An important event this year will also be the SER Conference on Ecological Restoration, in which IMCG is heavily participating and which has a major focus on peatlands, both in the presentations as well as in the conference excursions. We publish background information on the excursions to enable you to make an optimal choice. But hurry with signing up, because also here deadlines must be held.

Good news this time from Siberia, where Tomsk Oblast has just decided to put half a million ha of the Great Vasjugan Mire under nature conservation. A major achievement of our Russian colleagues, that deserves to be continued in the other oblasts over which Vasjugan is extending.

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 July 1st 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