Towards A Harmonised European Forest Monitoring System

Forests in Europe provide a range of ecosystem services, playing a vital role in fighting climate change. However, the lack of consistent and comprehensive pan-European forest information products and a coordinated monitoring system currently hampers the effective use of all available forest information. While National Forest Inventories are the main source of data, they have several limitations: disparate methodologies, high data collection costs, and difficulties to access data. Moreover, many remote sensing resources that have only recently become available are not optimally integrated into Europe-wide forest information products. The vision of the European Forest Information Network - EFINET is to fill these gaps by establishing a network that can facilitate an increase in the openness of available forest information in Europe and enable the coordination and assimilation of all available resources into pan-European forest information products.