The Documentation room (doc-room) has been created to collect all the information available on the state of the world’s forest. Documents stored in the room refer to 20, 30 years of history of Forest Resources Assessment and mainly refer to forest inventories and land cover assessments coming from most of all the developing countries.
The FRA Programme will use the most updated information that came in during the past 3 years to release forestry statistics for the year 2000.
In the doc-room it is possible to find books and reports: books refer to general topics, while reports refer to specific topics as forest inventories and land use.
As mentioned before at the beginning of the present report part of the duty was the reorganization of the doc-room and the first step consisted into defining the main subjects to sort al the available books and reports. Therefore information has been sorted in two different groups: world subjects, containing general documents and reports and country subjects containing specific information related to the three developing country regions: Africa, Asia and Latin America. The following lists provide both world subjects and country subjects.
§ Bio-diversity/Botany/Genetics
§ Land use
§ Soils/Maps
§ Forest plantations
§ Shifting cultivations
§ Non-wood products
§ Forest inventory assessment/Methods/Guidelines
§ Sylviculture and Forest management
§ Watershed management
§ Remote sensing/GIS
§ Non-forestry general
§ FRA general reports
§ FRA Projects/Papers and reports
§ Deforestation
§ Agriculture
§ Wood products-Forest industries
§ Volume and biomass
§ Logging/Harvesting
§ Forestry general
§ Statistics (Biology/Population/Economy)
§ Relevant to FORIS:
including the following subjects: land cover area/land use assessment, forest area, aerial photo interpretation, remote sensing, volume and biomass, forest inventory data, plantation data, shifting cultivation.
§ Forest Management and Sylviculture:
including the following subjects: management plans, data about sylvics in the country.
§ Forestry General:
including the following subjects: forestry statistics released by the government, forestry industries, logging and harvesting, thinning, forest measurements.
§ Other/Non forestry:
including the following subjects: remote sensed maps, cartography, GIS methodology, soil maps, ecological maps etc.
Finally, during the work, a control has been made on the availability of the sources, (especially for Africa and Latin America).
Each country box contains copy of the “country brief” which shows the sources that have been used in the previous estimates (FRAs and SOFOs) and availabilty of documents has been marked with checks on the country brief itself.
At the end of this step of the work, a short note has been sent to all the “users” of FRA, to explain the re-sorting criteria and to show them the better way to use the information contained in the doc. room.
