Report of the third Workshop on Practical Implementation of Statistical Sound Catch Sampling Programmes (WKPICS3)

This workshop, chaired by Jon Helge Vølstad (Norway) and Mike Armstrong (UK) was held at ICES headquarters, Copenhagen, from 19–22 November 2013. It was the third and final in a series of WKPICS workshops set up by the ICES Planning Group on Commercial Catches, Discards and Biological Sampling (PGCCDBS) to promote the implementation of statistically-sound designs for sampling commercial catches and help people to design and implement such schemes. The workshops focused on several classes of catch sampling schemes for estimating variables such as quantities discarded, and length or age composition of catches, taking account of the many practical problems that face people trying to obtain representa-tive, randomized samples of catches. The Workshops have provided guidelines for good practice, and explored ways of documenting the quality of sampling designs and of the data that are collected in a way that is useful for different types of end-users.