Wearing my other hat of Project Officer - Monitoring, I report in What's Out There? on some of the monitoring projects that the Research and Monitoring Coordination Unit is involved in. In Slick Talk, Steve Raaymakers summaries the report The International Response to the Ballast Water Issue - Implications for Australian Bulk Exports. He also discusses a manual (Ship Groundings in the Pacific Islands Region - Issues and Guidelines) which was recently released by the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme to assist Pacific island countries to deal with environmental issues associated with ship groundings.

Michelle Devlin, Jeremy Taylor and Jon Brodie summarise the results of a mapping and sampling exercise that was undertaken in January 1998 to study the flood plumes associated with cyclone Sid and cyclone Katrina. Also included is a media release from the CRC Reef Research Centre which announces the release of a report aimed at assisting marine tourism operators and volunteer groups develop coral reef monitoring programs.

Finally, I must offer our apologies to Offshore Scientific Pty Ltd. The article Assessing seagrass resources of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park which appeared in our March 1998 issue failed to acknowledge the involvement of Offshore Scientific Pty Ltd in the project to evaluate the use of acoustic techniques to map seagrass resources. Offshore Scientific Pty Ltd supplied the expertise, equipment and half of the personnel for the project mentioned in the article. If you are interested in learning more about mapping seagrasses using acoustic techniques please contact Offshore Scientific on +61 2 9980 7842.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for 1999.
Kim Lally

PS I recently got married - hence the new name!