Global Forest Land-use Change, 1990-2005

Book excerpt: The worlds forests are critical for human livelihoods. Increasingly they are being recognized for the wide range of products and essential ecosystem services they provide. Accurate and up-to-date information on the extent of the worlds forests, and the way they are changing, has never been more important. This report on the FRA 2010 Remote Sensing Survey is the first of its kind to present systematic estimates of global forest land use and change. It is the result of many years of planning and three years of detailed work by staff at FAO and the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), with inputs from technical experts from more than 100 countries. From its outset, the ambitious goal of the FRA 2010 Remote Sensing Survey has been to use remote sensing data to obtain globally consistent estimates of forest area and changes in tree cover and forest land use between 1990 and 2005.