Dear Friends,

The 15th International Congress of Speleology (ICS) begins exactly 9 months
from today! As the ICS rapidly approaches, I have two important and related
reminders:

1) If you plan to give a presentation at the ICS, either an oral paper or a
poster paper for the sessions or symposia, you must submit an abstract. The
abstract deadline is only 6 weeks away: 1 December 2008. NSS Members, notice
that this is much earlier than the usual abstract deadline for NSS Conventions.
By 1 January 2009, everyone will be notified if their abstract is accepted. The
reason for this early abstract deadline is because the abstracts should be
expanded into full papers, and the
 deadline for papers is 1 February 2009. The
papers will be reviewed, revised if needed, with the final version of the paper
submitted by 7 April 2009 for compilation into the ICS Proceedings. For complete
details, including guidelines on how to prepare your paper, visit:
http://www.ics2009.us/papers.html. Papers on all topics related to caves and
karst are welcome.

2) Everyone submitting a paper must be registered for the ICS. Please register
before the 1 February 2009 paper deadline so you can qualify for the lowest
possible registration rates. The price of registration increases on 1 February.

We are working to have on-line registration ready as soon as possible. We
discovered some technical problems and moved the ICS website to a new server. If
you notice any errors or problems with the website, it may be a result of this
change. Please let us know. We believe we have fixed all of the problems (and
 we
are rapidly improving the translations on the non-English pages). I expect we
will test on-line registration within a week. Once we are confident that it is
working and ready for your use, I will let you know.

George Veni, Ph.D.
Chairman, 15th International Congress of Speleology
Adjunct Secretary, International Union of Speleology
Executive Director, U.S. National Cave and Karst Research Institute