Government, research institutions and NGOs use these tools for a wide range of monitoring purposes such as:
Forest Inventories
Climate Change reporting
Socio-economic surveys
Biodiversity assessment
Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry measurement
Deforestation monitoring with remote sensing
Detecting desertification and trees outside of forest
The initiative is a collaborative effort of numerous public and private institutions and it is hosted by the Forestry Department of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.