FO: LACFC/2000/4

1.    At the request of the Member Nations and the world community, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) regularly monitors the world's forests through the Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) Programme, organized under the Forest Resources Division (FOR) at FAO headquarters in Rome. The Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000 (FRA 2000) will provide a review of the forest situation as it was at the end of the millennium. FRA 2000 will include country-level information based on existing forest inventory data, regional investigations of land-cover change processes, and a number of global studies focusing on the interaction between people and forests. The overall objective is to provide information and a source of knowledge on the world's forest resources. FRA 2000 will facilitate the discussion and stimulate decision-making on how to conserve and manage forest on the global scale. The FRA 2000 report will be made public and distributed on the World Wide Web in the year 2000.

2.    FRA 2000 is based on country-level information from national inventories, research projects, national consultations and various studies that provide information on forest cover, volume and change over time. Since 1998, FAO has been conducting data collection activities in Latin America and the Caribbean Region. National governments, local and regional institutions and research centres contributed to the collection of the information through meetings, working sessions, country visits, and development of reports.

3.    Most of the Latin American countries completed and provided the information to FAO by December 1999. The quality of the information varies from a country to another: for example, systematic inventories exist in Mexico. Most countries have developed a single national inventory in the past that has been used to produce subsequent estimates for succeeding time periods following this initial inventory. While some countries (Bolivia, Venezuela) have a forestry map, other countries are currently in the process of developing a national forest inventory (Argentina, Cuba).

4.    The Forest Resources Information System (FORIS), developed for FRA 2000, is a database that contains data collected from a variety of sources such as the national inventories which has been integrated with local definitions and national classifications. This database and corresponding definitions are used to reclassify forests, at the global level, adhering to FRA guidelines.

5.    In Brazil, due to the extension of the territory, vegetation and plantations, special efforts were made to collect relevant information. A total of 36 sources of information were analyzed by local consultants and revised by the Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (IBAMA). Brazil's information will be available by the end of May 2000, based on local and district inventories, and secondary information.

Table 1. FRA 2000 data collection status in Latin America

6.    The Caribbean countries have delivered their available information to FRA in March 2000. Specifically, Belize, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Bahamas and Puerto Rico provided FAO with updated and good quality information. Other Caribbean countries provided limited information, consisting primarily of estimates based on old data sets. A Caribbean workshop on data collection and analysis, from 21 to 25 February 2000 in Trinidad, was supported by the European Commission (EC) and FAO. Participants from 16 Caribbean countries participated in this workshop and provided national reports, some of which were used as main reports for FRA 2000.

7.    The International Institute of Tropical Forestry (IITF) collaborated with FAO on the collection of a set of information for the Caribbean Sub-Region. Most of this information is provided by FAO reports, documents, and papers. This material was used and incorporated into the FORIS when there were no other national sources. The vegetation description used in the Caribbean was based on the classification made by Beard in 1949. This is still used as a primary reference for forest types in the Sub-Region.

Sub-Region	Country	Currency of data for FRA 2000
Caribbean	Antilles	No information available
Caribbean	Antigua	1998 publication of the doc.
Caribbean	Aruba	No information available
Caribbean	Bahamas	Approximately 1986
Caribbean	Barbados	1998
Caribbean	Belize	1993-1994
Caribbean	Bermuda	1997 estimation
Caribbean	British Virgin Islands	No information available
Caribbean	Cayman Islands	No information available
Caribbean	Cuba	1998
Caribbean	Dominica	1987
Caribbean	Dominican Republic	1998
Caribbean	Guadeloupe	In progress
Caribbean	Guyana	1989
Caribbean	French Guiana	In progress
Caribbean	Haiti	In progress
Caribbean	Jamaica	1998
Caribbean	Martinique	No information available
Caribbean	Montserrat	No information available
Caribbean	Netherlands Antilles	No information available
Caribbean	Puerto Rico	1980-1990
Caribbean	St. Kitts and Nevis	1996
Caribbean	St. Lucia	1993
Caribbean	Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	1982
Caribbean	Suriname	1995
Caribbean	Trinidad and Tobago	1992
Caribbean	Turk and Caicos Islands	No information available
Caribbean	United States Virgin Islands	No information available

8.    Countries are currently in the process of validating the complete set of information organized for FRA 2000 and once this process is completed by the end of the year, it will be available on the Forestry Department Web site. Completed information for Latin America and the Caribbean that is currently available on the Web contains country profiles with preliminary maps, geography, description of natural woody vegetation, protected areas, and contacts. National statistics, local definitions, FRA re-classified data will be available by December 2000. During this time period, a number of special studies will also be presented (trees outside forest, biomass, non-wood forest products, and fires among others).

9.    Country information on the Web will be continuously up-dated and the users can comment on the information directly through the web-site. These comments will be revised by FRA and incorporated into the official national data to satisfy country needs.

Country	Land area	Forest and other wooded land	Forest
	1 000 ha	1 000 ha	Total 1 000 ha	% of land area	Natural 1 000 ha	Plantation 1 000 ha	1 000 ha
Costa Rica	5.106	1.569	1.456	29	1.428	28	113
El Salvador	2.085	890	127	6	123	4	763
Guatemala	10.843	9.465	4.253	39	4.225	28	5.212
Honduras	11.189	6.054	4.608	41	4.605	3	1.446
Mexico	190.869	129.057	48.695	26	48.586	109	80.362
Nicaragua	11.875	7.732	6.027	51	6.013	14	1.705
Panama	7.599	3.266	3.123	41	3.117	6	143
Central America	239.566	158.034	68.289	29	68.097	192	89.744
Bolivia	108.438	57.977	49.345	46	49.317	28	8.632
Brazil	845.651	671.921	566.007	67	561.107	4.900	105.914
Colombia	103.870	63.231	54.190	52	54.064	126	9.041
Ecuador	27.684	15.576	12.007	43	11.962	45	3.569
Paraguay	39.730	19.256	12.868	32	12.859	9	6.388
Peru	128.000	84.844	68.090	53	67.906	184	16.754
Venezuela	88.205	69.436	45.943	52	45.690	253	23.493
Tropical South America	1.341.578	982.242	808.450	60	802.905	5.545	173.791
Tropical Latin America and Caribbean	1.650.383	1.191.265	924.187	56	918.139	6.047	267.077
Argentina	273.669	50.936	34.436	13	33.889	547	16.500
Chile	74.880	16.583	8.033	11	7.018	1015	8.550
Uruguay	17.481	933	813	5	657	156	120
Non Tropical South America	366.030	68.453	43.283	12	41.564	1.719	25.170
Total Latin America and Caribbean	2.016.413	1.259.717	967.469	48	959.703	7.765	292.247

10.    During the period 6 to 10 March 2000, FAO/FRA conducted an Expert Consultation on forest cover change analysis to evaluate a range of approaches to estimate forest change for FRA 2000. Participants used their expertise to review current FRA data to develop a state-of-the-art approach to measure and estimate forest change.

Country	Land area	Forest and other wooded land	Forest
	1 000 ha	1 000 ha	Total 1 000 ha	% of land area	Natural 1 000 ha	Plantation 1 000 ha	1 000 ha
Barbados	43	5	0	0	0	0	5
Bermuda	5	1	0	0	0	0	1
British Virgin Islands	15	5	3	20	3	0	2
Cayman Islands	26	6	0	0	0	0	6
Montserrat	10	4	3	25	2	0	1
Netherlands Antilles	80	7	0	0	0	0	7
St.Pierre & Miquelon	23	1	0	0	0	0	1
United States Virgin Islands	34	14	14	41	14	0	0
Antigua and Barbuda	44	26	10	23	10	0	16
Bahamas	1.001	186	186	19	186	0	0
Belize	2.280	2.117	1.998	88	1.996	2	119
Cuba	10.982	3.262	1.960	18	1.715	245	1.302
Dominica	75	50	44	59	44	0	6
Dominican Republic	4.838	1.530	1.084	22	1.077	7	446
French Guiana	8.815	8.318	7.997	91	7.997	0	321
Grenada	34	11	6	18	6	0	5
Guadeloupe	169	93	93	55	93	0	0
Guyana	19.685	18.755	18.424	94	18.416	8	331
Haiti	2.756	139	31	1	23	8	108
Jamaica	1.083	653	254	23	239	15	399
Martinique	106	71	43	41	43	0	28
Puerto Rico	886	336	324	37	321	3	12
St. Kitts and Nevis	36	24	13	36	13	0	11
St. Lucia	61	34	5	8	5	0	29
St. Vincent	39	12	11	28	11	0	1
Suriname	15.600	15.093	14.776	95	14.768	8	317
Trinidad and Tobago	513	236	168	33	155	13	68
Caribbean	69.239	50.989	47.447	69	47.137	309	3.542

11.    This panel experts recommended that FAO/FRA draw on multiple sources of data for FRA 2000 and produce estimates with the co-operation and approval of countries. Data and sources on time series on forest cover are available in the FRA Documentation Center and will be used to provide information on forest area changes during the 1980s, 1990s and projected to the year 2000. FRA 2000 personnel are now in the process of selecting, classifying and incorporating this information into the FORIS. Final summary recommendations of the Expert Consultation: Review of FRA 2000 Methodology for Global and Regional Forest Change Assessment are the following:

1. That the FRA Programme carry out a specific expert assessment for each country;
2. That the expert assessment rely on multiple sources of information, such as country data, remote sensing samples, expert opinion, etc;
3. That FRA should seek widely to gather all potentially useful data sources in each country; that they should select the most relevant information sets from the multiple sources for use in the estimation procedures; that irrelevant sources of information are not used in the estimation for FRA 2000; and that the selected information sources be weighted according to their relevance and reliability for use in generating the estimates;
4. That the estimation procedure be documented and made transparent to countries and the procedure applied be according to the information available and its utility for assessing change 1990 - 2000 and state 2000;
5. That FRA acknowledge the importance and value of the national information, and that a "country information set" containing the country contributions be published in addition to the FRA 2000 adjusted estimates;
6. FAO will carry out the assessment in a participatory manner. All countries will be given the opportunity to provide comments to FAO on the information sources used and assumptions made in the weighting, as well as the final estimate. This will be done through a formal standardised feedback mechanism and "country brief" to be sent to each country. FAO will convene workshops for validating the estimations when appropriate and practical;
7. Operational guidelines are developed for the "Convergence Methods" proposed in the Consultation and distributed to countries and international co-operators. FRA should continue to refine and test the methods explored in the expert meeting;
8. Estimates generated for countries and for the regions through different methods should be compared and analysed. FRA should evaluate the option of producing separate estimates for regions and by countries, or, conversely, to produce an "integrated estimate".

12.    Special studies have been made and published as FRA Working Papers:

• FRA 2000 Terms and Definitions.
• FRA 2000 Guidelines for assessments in tropical and sub-tropical countries.
• The status of the forest resources assessment in the South-Asian sub-region and the country capacity building needs. Proceedings of the GCP/RAS/162/JPN regional workshop held in Dehradun, India, 8-12 June 1998.
• Volume/Biomass Special Study: georeferenced forest volume data for Latin America.
• Volume/Biomass Special Study: georeferenced forest volume data for Asia and Tropical Oceania.
• Country Maps for the Forestry Department Web site.
• Forest Resources Information System (FORIS) - Concepts and Status Report.
• Remote Sensing and Forest Monitoring in FRA 2000 and beyond.
• Volume/Biomass special Study: Georeferenced Forest Volume Data for Tropical Africa.
• Memorias del Taller sobre el Programa de Evaluación de los Recursos Forestales en Once Países Latinoamericanos (in Spanish).
• Non-wood forest Products study for Mexico, Cuba and South America (draft for Comments).
• Annotated bibliography on Forest cover change - Nepal.
• Annotated bibliography on Forest cover change - Guatemala.
• Forest plantation resource in developing countries.
• Global forest cover map.
• A concept and strategy for ecological zoning for the global forest resources.
• Assessment 2000 - Interim report.
• Evaluación de los productos forestales no madereros en América Central.