Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI, Inc.), for their support to this manual. We are especially grateful to Jack Dangermond (president and founder of ESRI) and Jim Henderson (ESRI, international technical marketing and training) for their donation of copies of free software to support this manual. This donation will enable institutes/organizations in developing countries to perform spatial analyses of their data using GIS. Institutes or organizations meeting the necessary criteria^[1]are eligible for this software donation. Please contact authors of this manual for details.

Special thanks are due to Geoff Meaden (Fisheries GIS Unit, Canterbury Christ Church University College, UK), who gave valuable advice and very kindly reviewed this manual.

Many thanks go to Tony Booth of the University of Alaska Fairbanks for his reviewing and comments on the chapter on Kriging. In addition, many thanks go to Jim Kapetsky who prepared the overview of past activities at FIRI.

Parts of the manual by de Graaf et al. (2000) were used for this manual, and the kind permission of Nefisco foundation, Amsterdam and the Center for Environment and GIS for Water Sector Planning (CEGIS), Dhaka is greatly acknowledged. The manual by de Graaf et al. (2000) was written with funding from the Government of the Netherlands in cooperation with CEGIS in Dhaka for use in Bangladesh.

The manual was tested in Namibia and Uganda. The test course in Namibia was hosted by the National Marine Information and Research Centre, Swakopmund, with support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation and the one in Uganda was hosted by the Ugandan Fisheries Resources Research Institute and the EU-funded Lake Victoria Fisheries Resources Project. Comments for improvements on the manual made by the students during the courses in Namibia and Uganda are greatly appreciated.

Claudia Riva made a final quality check on the data and exercises presented in this manual.

For the real world exercises data and methods were made available by Paul Eastwood, Geoff Meaden, Arturo Ruiz and Fabio Corsi.

Design and layout were by Nadia Pellicciotta.

^[1] Criteria for software donation:
The institute/organization should be:

located in a developing country, to be determined by whether or not the country is on the world bank list of low income and lower middle income countries (see the world bank list: http://www.worldbank.org/data/countryclass/classgroups.htm#Low_income);
involved in research or education in inland fisheries biology/management/planning;
a non-profit organization;
recognized nationally or regionally by the government(s) involved;
in need of support in respect with software;
endorsed by the FAO's Regional Aquaculture/Fisheries Officer (Bangkok, Thailand; Accra, Ghana; Santiago de Chile, Chile).