National forest monitoring system

A national forest monitoring system (NFMS) is a country's institutional and technical arrangement for monitoring forests and producing information for decision-making and reporting, as described by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

In the context of REDD+, Decision 11/CP.19 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted as part of the Warsaw Framework for REDD+, encourages developing countries undertaking REDD+ activities to establish NFMSs that are transparent and consistent and that draw on both remote sensing and ground-based forest inventory approaches, as appropriate to national circumstances. The Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) sets out methods for integrating satellite and ground-based observations for estimating emissions and removals from forests in this reporting context.

A NFMS brings together institutional arrangements (such as roles, coordination, and data stewardship) with technical methods for data collection, management, quality assurance, and dissemination of results, as set out in FAO publications and by the UN-REDD Programme. NFMSs can produce outputs such as time series of forest area and change, maps, and estimates of biomass or carbon stocks, with accompanying documentation and uncertainty information. These outputs can support land-use greenhouse-gas inventories prepared using methods from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and can contribute to periodic forest assessments such as FAO's Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA).