Latest IACMST Publication
The latest publication in the IACMST Information Document series, prepared by Dr Mark Charlesworth of the Marine Environmental Action Group, is Marine and Coastal Photographs and Videos: their availability, uses and curation, an amalgam of presentations, posters, discussions and recommendations from a workshop held at the Institute of Marine Engineering Science and Technology in 2005 entitled ‘Marine Sample Collections: their value, use and future’. Marine and coastal photographs and videos are important resources for research and monitoring, and if properly curated may be of use to researchers long after they were first obtained and can be used for other purposes beyond which they were originally collected. For instance, photo identification is one of the key techniques used in cetacean research. There were over 50,000 images of cetaceans scattered over Europe and held in many different collections, but these have now been complied into Europhlukes, a European photo ID system and database, which can be accessed by researchers via the web. Copies of this report can be obtained via the IACMST Secretariat.

First IACMST Underwater Sound Forum Meeting
Monday 4 December 2006, IMarEST, London
The meeting considered the recommendations made in the IACMST Underwater Sound and Marine Life Report together with the notes of the discussion which took place at the science meeting held on 9 October 2006. The next meeting of the Forum will be held on 27 March 2007.

Latest IACMST Publication
A new publication in the IACMST Information Document series has just been published. Prepared by Dr Mark Charlesworth of the Marine Environmental Action Group, Marine and Coastal Photographs and Videos: their availability, uses and curation is an amalgam of presentations, posters, discussions and recommendations from a workshop held at the Institute of Marine Engineering Science and Technology in 2005 entitled ‘Marine Sample Collections: their value, use and future’. Marine and coastal photographs and videos are important resources for research and monitoring, and if properly curated may be of use to researchers long after they were first obtained and can be used for other purposes beyond which they were originally collected. For instance, photo identification is one of the key techniques used in cetacean research. There were over 50,000 images of cetaceans scattered over Europe and held in many different collections, but these have now been compiled into Europhlukes, a European photo ID system and database, which can be accessed by researchers via the web. Copies of this report can be obtained via the IACMST Secretariat.

GOOS AG Open Meeting 2006
The 2006 GOOS AG Open Meeting was held at the Countryside Council for Wales’s headquarters in Bangor, North Wales on the 9 October 2006. Over 50 persons, representing a range of organisations from Wales and North West England as well as elsewhere in the United Kingdom, attended the Open Meeting, which took as its theme ‘Physical Measurements for Ecosystems Requirements’. Talks included those of two keynote speakers: Professor Franciscus Colijn, Director of The Institute of Coastal Research at GKSS in Germany, and John Siddorn of The National Centre for Ocean Forecasting, a strategic partnership between the Met Office, the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and the Environmental Systems Science Centre at Reading. A report on the day’s proceedings will appear in due course on the GOOS website.

Joint MEDAG/MDIP Forum
A Joint Marine Environmental Data/Marine Data and Information Partnership Forum was held on 19 June 2006 at the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST), London. The theme of the meeting was ‘Marine Data – Meeting Future Requirements’. The presentations can be downloaded; see MEDAG home page for further details.