The web statistics of the IMCG website www.imcg.net indicate growing interest in mire and peatland conservation worldwide. IMCG has been using a website for rapid information exchange since the late 1990’s. Before 2001, Richard Lindsay and Germain Mesureur from London University managed an IMCG website at their University server. At the end of 2000, a domain was registered and in January 2001 the website was established at www.imcg.net.
Since August 2002 the activities on the website are monitored by webstats. In January 2007 the IMCG web pages had been visited more than 30.000 times. The annual growth rate of page views increased constantly from 10% in the period 2002 - 2003 to 35% in the period 2005 - 2006. Hopefully in 2007 www.imcg.net will be visited for the first time by more than 10.000 visitors in a single year.
The website interests people worldwide. However, visitors come predominantly from Europe (75%), North America (12%) and Asia (6%). Visitors from Africa (2%), Australia (1.6%), South America (1.2%) and Central America (0.3%) clearly are a minority. This spectrum of visitors reflects past IMCG activities. Field symposia in South Africa and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, led to an increase in the number of page views from those areas.
At present the web site offers
- a complete archive of the IMCG newsletter since 1997, (only the first newsletters from before 1997 are missing),
- an archive of IMCG resolutions and statements from Norway in 1994 to Finland in 2006,
- a list of publications and teaching material authored by IMCG or IMCG members,
- a global peatland database with information about mire and peatland distribution and quality per nation,
- links to other mire and peatland related websites,
- an up-to-date overview of upcoming events related to mire and peatland conservation worldwide,
- a list of threatened mires and peatlands,
- other membership information including application forms, IMCG past and present action plans, and contact details.
These are good reasons to make the IMCG website www.imcg.net your entry point to mire and peatland conservation on the web. If you want to add anything to the website contact the IMCG secretariat at info@imcg.net or web administrator Michael Trepel at trepel@gmx.net.
Michael Trepel