The origin and scope of the series FAO Manuals in Fisheries Science are described in the foreword. Part 1 of the present volume, comprised of the first four sections of the entire manual, deals with sampling methods. It is a revision of FAO Fisheries Biology Technical Paper No. 26 which was issued in October 1962 as a provisional English version only. That in turn was an expanded version of J.A. Gulland (1957) FAO fish. Bull., 10(4): 157-181 (published in English, French and Spanish), revised on the basis of the author's experience at an FAO/EPTA Training Center on the Methodology and Techniques of Research on Mackerel (Rastrelliger), held at Bangkok, Thailand, in 1958, and at the Training Course on Fish Population Dynamics at Lowestoft, England in 1957. Technical Paper No. 26, which was prepared at the request of the Indo-Pacific Fisheries Council (Karachi meeting, 1960) was used at seminars given by the author in Australia in 1962 and 1964, at the second Training Course of Fish Stock Assessment, sponsored by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and held at Lowestoft in 1963, and at the FAO/EPTA Training Center on Research on Tunas and Mackerels, in Australia in 1964. The present version incorporates amendments based on this experience, and on numerous comments received from correspondents. Although applicable in principle also to inland fisheries, the methods described and the examples given relate primarily to marine investigations.
Part 2 of this manual dealing with statistical methods will consist of a series of fascicules, each a section by a particular author and dealing with a method useful in fisheries biology, with worked examples. Preparation of these sections is a co-operative project of FAO and ICES for which a joint Editorial Group, under the leadership of Mr. J.A. Pope, is responsible. The plans and procedures for publishing them are described in the provisional version of Section 5 (Computations, by K.P. Anderson) issued in 1965 as FAO Fisheries Technical Paper No. 26, Suppl. 1.
