The manual was prepared for a training workshop for fisheries biologists in Bangladesh that was presented in August 2000. The intention of this manual is:

To provide some basic information on GIS to fisheries biologists and environmentalists who have no previous experience with GIS;

To provide examples/exercises on how GIS can be used in fisheries;

To provide basic principles in the form of an exercise demonstrating how GIS can be used for the development of decision support models in floodplain fisheries.

The manual should not be considered as a complete training manual on GIS; for that it is incomplete as it covers only a small number of methods and does not provide the details and mathematical background of a number of analytical tools.

It is realised that most of the training is based on data on floodplain fisheries in Bangladesh. However, the basic principles can be in applied other countries or fisheries ecosystems.