In algebraic geometry, a prestack F over a category C equipped with some Grothendieck topology is a category together with a functor p: F → C satisfying a certain lifting condition and such that (when the fibers are groupoids) locally isomorphic objects are isomorphic. A stack is a prestack with effective descents, meaning local objects may be patched together to become a global object.
Prestacks that appear in nature are typically stacks but some naively constructed prestacks (e.g., groupoid scheme or the prestack of projectivized vector bundles) may not be stacks. Prestacks may be studied on their own or passed to stacks.
Since a stack is a prestack, all the results on prestacks are valid for stacks as well. Throughout the article, we work with a fixed base category C; for example, C can be the category of all schemes over some fixed scheme equipped with some Grothendieck topology.