The FORIS database currently contains forest cover only for countries in the (sub-)tropical regions of the world, including Temperate South America (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay). By a decision of the FRA Project Director and the FRA Senior Forestry Officer it was established that only data actually controlled or endorsed by FRA would be made available on the web site, and that users would be referred to national web sites for any maps posted there.
A list of national forestry web sites has been compiled for the web site and the consultant browsed these for maps comparable in content to the forest cover maps. The list of web sites investigated is included in Appendix 3.
The review of the list of national forestry web sites produced no comparable maps and indeed very few maps at all. As a matter of fact, some national sites are not publicly accessible, or offer only very summary information on the national forestry department. There is also a number of sites that does not offer an English version of the information.
The forestry web site of Canada is a positive exception (although no comparable map data was found). Here one can find statistics on forests in Canada and a document with the state of Canada's forests can be downloaded. Also, there are detailed maps with forest inventory data for the province of Ontario. There are links to forest research institutes and other sites of interest.
The only publicly available web site that offer good quality maps for most countries worldwide is that of WCMC (http://www.wcmc.org.uk/forest/data/), produced jointly with CIFOR, for which also FAO data has been used. The data sources used for the presented maps are not necessarily endorsed by national governments though. On this site there are also maps are available of protected areas and parks, and assorted information on forest statistics and endangered species of flora and fauna.
