Open Foris Arena User Meeting showcases innovative field applications on forests and beyond

More than 70 participants from research institutions, academia, and field projects joined the Open Foris Arena User Meeting 2025 on November 12th, an interactive webinar highlighting the latest developments and real-world applications of FAO’s Open Foris Arena and Arena Mobile solutions.

Moderated by Rebecca Tavani, Forestry Officer of FAO’s Forestry Division, the event brought together users and developers of Open Foris Arena to exchange knowledge on data collection, field applications, and future enhancements of the open-source platform. Tavani underscored that the session was “a great opportunity to interact with those who have experience using Arena, as well as those actively developing it.”

Funded through the AIM4Forests programme with support from the UK Government, Arena builds on the legacy of the Finnish Government’s investment in Open Foris data systems. Its open-source nature allows users to customize surveys, integrate mobile data collection, and link field data to national and research monitoring frameworks.

From mountains to savannas: Arena in action

The webinar showcased “super users” from around the world, illustrating Arena’s versatility across diverse ecosystems—from high-altitude tree mapping in California’s Sierra Nevada to biodiversity surveys in South Africa and adaptive forest management in Europe.

• Sachi Srivastava, a researcher at the University of California Davis, presented her team’s use of Arena Mobile to survey subalpine forests and track species migration under climate change in Sierra Nevada. Conducting over 650 tree observations across over 20 peaks, her team leveraged Arena for GPS-based data collection, imagery validation, and real-time cloud backup—using only mobile phones in rugged terrain.
• Dr. Jeff Morris, from South Africa’s KwaMandlangampisi Protected Environment, shared plans for a biodiversity baseline survey using Arena and Arena Mobile to support long-term vegetation monitoring project. The project will engage young scientists to document changes in forest composition across 50,000 hectares of protected land.
• Oscar Garcia Companys, field researcher at the University of California, demonstrated how Arena supports advanced sampling methodologies for carbon quantification in California’s shrublands. He emphasized how Arena’s flexibility accommodates transect-based methods that combine canopy and groundcover analysis in complex ecosystems.
• Bryant Nagelson, a Forest Ecologist with the University of Nevada, Reno referred to Arena as a ‘gamechanger’ for data management. He uses the platform for highly complex, long-term studies involving high spatial and temporal replication for continuous forest inventory and region-wide provenance trial tracking.
• Dr. Lutz Fehrmann, forest scientist at the University of Göttingen, Germany, presented examples of Arena’s integration into university research and teaching. His team applies Open Foris solutions (Collect, Collect Earth, Collect Mobile) for both academic training and applied forest inventories across Europe, recently switching from Collect to Arena. Fehrmann praised Arena’s reliability and adaptability, noting that “Arena remains the solution best adapted to our use cases in forest inventories.”

Beyond forestry: Expanding Arena usage to sustainable supply chains

The event also featured Inna Punda from FAO’s Investment Centre, who shared how Arena’s use has extended beyond forest monitoring to the agricultural sector. Since 2017, Collect and Arena have supported digital farm audits in collaboration with dairy and beef associations in Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, helping make supply chains more transparent and inclusive.

Looking ahead: Latest updates and developments

FAO’s Stefano Ricci concluded the session with updates on new Arena and Arena Mobile features and upcoming improvements, including the new Arena logo, enhanced data synchronization, user interface refinements, and growing library of video tutorials that will be available briefly. Among the planned features, Arena will be able to use Artificial Intelligence to automatically translate labels; this helps users from different linguistic backgrounds to access and use Arena more easily and support collaboration. The ability to record audio directly within the mobile app is also in the list of new features to be developed, to facilitate field data collection.

Across all presentations, two core strengths of Arena emerged: its high flexibility for diverse projects and its ability to manage longitudinal data over time. New features allowing visualization field work status were also appreciated. Feedback from participants, included, but were not limited to, issues regarding mobile data uploads, local backups, and public data sharing. Additional requests such as creating a function to track and ‘see trees’ through time, facilitating import of old data into Arena, expanding analysis tools and increasing user guides were received and will inform future development priorities.

As Tavani noted in closing, "Arena’s strength lies in its community of users—each project contributes to making this solution more adaptable, accessible, and powerful for the global monitoring community.”

Do you want to share your experience using Arena?
Write to [email protected] and share your story and suggestions with the Open Foris team.