The expert panel reviewed a draft set of recommendations prepared by the Chair and Vice-chair. The final recommendations were approved in plenary session.
With regard to completing FRA 2000 the consultation supports and recommends the following:
1. That the FRA Programme carry out a specific expert assessment for each country.
2. That the expert assessment rely on multiple sources of information, such as country data, remote sensing samples, expert opinion, etc.
3. That FRA should seek widely to gather all potentially useful data sources in each country; that they should select the most relevant information sets from the multiple sources for use in the estimation procedures; that irrelevant sources of information are not used in the estimation for FRA 2000; and that the selected information sources be weighted according to their relevance and reliability for use in generating the estimates.
4. That the estimation procedure be documented and made transparent to countries and the procedure applied be according to the information available and its utility for assessing change from 1990 to 2000 and state as of 2000.
5. That FRA will acknowledge the importance and value of the national information, and that a “country information set” containing the country contributions be published in addition to the FRA 2000 adjusted estimates.
6. FAO will carry out the assessment in a participatory manner. All countries will be given the opportunity to provide comments to FAO on the information sources used and assumptions made in the weighting, as well as the final estimate. This will be done through a formal standardised feedback mechanism and “country brief” to be sent to each country. FAO will convene workshops for validating the estimates when appropriate and practical;
7. Operational guidelines will be developed for the “convergence methods” proposed in this consultation and distributed to countries and international co-operators. FRA should continue to refine and test the methods explored in this expert meeting.
8. Estimates generated for countries and regions through different methods should be compared and analysed. FRA should evaluate the option of producing separate estimates for regions and by countries or, conversely to produce an “integrated estimate”.
In issues related to data, the consultation advised FAO:
1. To use supplemental sampling with remote sensing in tropical Africa to bolster the information base in this region.
2. AVHRR alone is not of use in direct change assessments for FRA 2000.
3. Seek effective ways to post-stratify the regional remote sensing assessments to improve estimates in countries with low-utility data.
4. Include remote sensing samples from a given country as “information” to be evaluated and weighted for potential use in the national assessments.
5. The FRA 1990 model should not be used to generate estimates for 2000, but the estimates generated previously by FAO for reference years 1990 and 1995 may be used as a possible data source for evaluation.
6. To reassess the information utility for specific countries, noting that the consultation found in some few cases the rating to be too high or too low (it was noted that the feedback mechanism to FAO from countries should help to ensure that all relevant data has been used in the assessment).
7. Care must be taken in use of independent surveys for change assessment.
In issues related to the selection of experts, the consultation advised FAO:
1. Identify, to the extent possible, a complement of national and international experts to give feedback on country-specific estimates, emphasizing the need for national experts to participate in the assessment of their own country.
2. The participants of the expert consultation will serve as a “core advisory group” for FRA 2000 and for FRA issues in the future, including capacity building and periodic assessments.
With regard to assessments beyond FRA 2000 the consultation supports and recommends the following:
1. In co-operation with national and international organisations, continue to analyse the impact of different terms and definitions and how compatibility can best be achieved between national and global information sets. FRA should increase its outreach to ensure that global reporting needs are taken into consideration in the early stages of inventory and mapping programmes.
2. FRA should continue to improve all methods, definitions and country-capacity building activities.
3. Consider creating a global cartographic base of forests and land-cover.
4. Consider the use of medium-resolution satellite data, especially to stratify sampling.
5. That future FRAs consider using the best estimates for countries and another set of estimates at the regional level.
6. Develop mechanisms to better track projects in countries and to make full use of information from existing and ongoing programmes.
7. Use systematic sampling in future sampling programmes, noting that since strata will change according to needs, this approach will be more appropriate for post-stratification with new criteria.
8. Consider increasing the FAO remote sensing sampling intensity, possibly to ~ 25%.
9. Expand country –capacity-building programmes to enhance the information needed at the national level for forestry purposes, which may also be of utility for global assessments.
10. Consider expanding coverage of future assessments to include all trees (outside “forests”).
With regard to the follow-up to the expert consultation, in issues related to the selection of experts, the consultation advised FAO:
1. A meeting report should be produced that includes: a) recommendations of the consultation; b) a summary report derived from the meeting minutes; c) the background paper as an appendix; d) relevant appendixes from the meeting materials (others to be referenced in a bibliography); and e) the regional exercises.
2. Minutes from the meeting will be circulated by email. Participants will have one week to respond with comments to the chairman, with a copy to FAO.
3. FRA is asked to construct an internal web site where expert panel documents can be posted for review and where panel members can post comments on review items.
4. Operational guidelines and other technical documents subsequently developed by FRA staff should be posted on this web site for review by expert panel members.
In issues related to the development of a world forest survey, the expert panel recommends:
1. FRA/FAO should take the lead in developing a proposal for a world forest survey (WFS) demonstrating the potential customers, costs and benefits of such a system.
2. That a first step in such a process should be to further identify potential WFS customers and their needs.
3. That the Expert Panel should take up this issue in future agendas.
4. That FRA/FAO should prepare a technical document on the WFS concept.
5. That FRA/FAO should host a future expert panel meeting to further develop the WFS idea, using the document developed in (4) above as a background document to the meeting.
