Abstract:
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has collected global level forest in-
formation since 1947. UN-ECE/FAO (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe/FAO) has co-
operated with FAO in collecting and publishing the Temperate and Boreal region data (UN-ECE/FAO, 2000).
The most recent report, FRA 2005 was published in late 2005 (FAO 2005). Forest resources assessment is
based mainly on National Forest Inventories (NFI) conducted at national and sub-national levels.
Countries are planning and conducting the inventories on the basis of their own information needs and
traditions. Some countries have long traditions, from the beginning of 1920s, while other countries have
conducted just one inventory or are even planning the first sampling based inventory, or at a global level,
are lacking even the first inventory. While some inventories are wood production oriented, some other
inventories are targeted to produce information about non-wood goods and services, or are multi-purpose
inventories. Most inventories collect information on the same base variables; however, some inventories
collect some hundreds of parameters measured on the field (Tomppo and Andersson 2008).
During the past 10 years, The Forestry Department of FAO has invested substantial resources to develop a
programme of support to national forest monitoring and assessment (NFMA) (Saket et al. 2010). NFMA
operates is mainly that of countries in development. Technical, financial and institutional capacity are often
needed.
