The President and Secretary have continued to provide scientific advice and support for various international activities within the field of biological oceanography, particularly those relating to marine biodiversity, which the officers believe merits more attention than it currently receives in most National Action Plans that have developed as a direct result of the Biodiversity Convention. In particular the President has been active in promoting the Census of Marine Life (CoML) as an international research programme, to know better "what is where", as a prerequisite to addressing any threat, real or potential, to the biodiversity of the oceans.

As a result, CoML is one of seven symposia with a strong biological oceanographic component, out of a total of eighteen, which are included in the programme of the Congress, "2001: An Ocean Odyssey," to be held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in October 2001 (see the web page at http://www.criba.edu.ar/2001).

· Altogether, these symposia are:
· Regional Estuarine and Coastal Systems of the Americas
· Marginal and Semi-enclosed Seas
· Census of Marine Life
· Impacts on Sandy Beaches
· Mesoscale and Smaller Scale Variability and Related Biological Processes
· The Joint Global Ocean Flux Study
· Ecosystems Dynamics: Integrating Biology and Physics

The Congress will be a Joint Assembly of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) and of IABO. It will be the first official IABO Assembly for a number of years, for the reasons given in last year's report, namely that the development of international programmes under such organizations as IGBP has provided a continuing forum for communication within, and publicity for, current themes of research. At the Congress, however, there will once again be an opportunity for structured dialogue between such themes, and it is confidently expected that the international community of biological oceanographers will relish this opportunity.