Dozens of poeple have registered or submitted abstracts for the Panama conference. It is an international group, with experience in places such as Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, El Salvador, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Nicaragua, Palestine, Panama, Pakistan, Singapore, Ukraine, UK and USA.

On Friday, I compared with list with the attendee list from our 2006 conference in Berlin. 140 people were registered to attend that meeting -- and 19 of them are expected to come to the 2007 conference in Panama. I am quite pleased with that statistic, given that the meeting is (1) in a different continent and (2) that many of the 2006 participants were student grantees.

In addition to registrations, we are getting confirmations on the tours. The three-hour tours are on Friday and Saturday morning. One group will be going to Culebra, an environnmental education center on the waterfront managed by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Another group will be going to the Pamana Canal. Two or three additional tours are still in the development stages - the exact number of tours will depend on the number of conference participants.