Global Forest Resources Assessments

Remote Sensing

Since 1990, FAO's Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) complements the information collected through the country reporting process with global and regional analysis of the world’s forest resources using remote sensing. With better access to a growing archive of satellite imagery and the availability of new tools to facilitate image processing and interpretation, remote sensing has become an important tool for the assessment of status and changes in tree cover and land use. The objectives of the RSS are to:

  • build country capacities to use remote sensing for forest monitoring; and
  • generate independent, robust and consistent estimates of forest area and its changes over time at global, regional and biome levels

FRA 2025 Remote Sensing Survey

What's next? FRA 2025 RSS

FAO is undertaking another participatory global Remote Sensing Survey (RSS) to obtain up-to-date, reliable and consistent estimates of forest area and forest area change at regional, global and global ecological zone (GEZ) levels up to the year 2024.

This new data collection cycle is planned to be a two-year process to be completed by mid-2025, which will be carried out through the organization of 25 workshops globally. It will entail the data collection of around half of the RSS 2020 global samples along with multiple new samples to obtain up-to-date statistics for the year 2024.

The data collection process is planned to involve around 400 local experts around the world. The results of the FRA 2025 RSS are expected to be published in 2026.

The latest FRA 2025 RSS cycle commenced in 2023 with several successful pilot country studies from Bolivia, Zimbabwe and the Mediterranean region.

For this new FRA RSS cycle, the multitude of variables collected in the last cycle will be built upon with updated data through the year 2024 and additional information on agroforestry systems, pastoral systems, crop types, burned forest, mangroves and trees outside of forests.

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Latest newsletter 2023/Issue#15
Remote Sensing Survey Newsletter archive