Report of the Ad Hoc meeting of the Co-ordinators of the 1991 Stomach Sampling Database

Since 1984, when the first trial runs of the North Sea MSVPA were conducted (Anonymous, 1994), using feeding data from the stomachs sampled in 1981, various changes have been made to the input data. Corrections have been made to the original stomach contents data and to the auxiliary data (age length keys, survey data), additional stomachs have been sampled and there have been changes in the methods used to process the stomach data into the form required as input to MSVPA. Because these changes affect the results of the MSVPA in various ways, it is important that they should be documented.