Forestry

The Forestry Division supports efforts to make forest data more open and transparent and will be moving additional country validated forest data to the Hand-in-Hand geospatial platform over the coming months.

A key source of country validated forest data is from web-portals for National Forest Monitoring Systems (NFMS). A multipurpose NFMS provides transparent, reliable, relevant, accessible, and sustainable national level forest data as articulated in FAO's 2019 Voluntary Guidelines for National Forest Monitoring, FAO has supported 50 countries in developing NFMS though capacity development and technology transfer.

NFMS consists of Satellite Land Monitoring Systems (SLMS) for spatial data and National Forest Inventory (NFI) for field data and for estimating timber and carbon stocks. Much of the progress on NFMS has been supported by FAO technical solutions developed under the OpenForis initiative.

Country approved NFMS data will be incrementally added to the Hand-in-Hand.

FAO's authoritative source of global forest data is the Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA), and the 2020 FRA data provides country validated forest data, accessible through an interactive platform and dashboards for 236 countries and territories.