The digital revolution in forest monitoring: From Foris to Open Foris

06/03/2026

The quest to understand and manage the world’s forests began centuries before satellites. As early as the 16th century, European laws regulated logging, and by the 17th century, growing wood scarcity in Central Europe intensified concerns about sustainable supply. In the 1850s, foresters such as D. Brandis formalized these principles through systematic teak inventories in Burma, helping establish scientific forest management.  

By 1910, the United States Forest Service had prepared a remarkably comprehensive report on global forest products, ownership, and sustainability, setting the stage for a century of systematic observation. When the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was founded in 1945, it immediately recognized that “the whole world is suffering from shortages of forest products,” leading to the publication of the first “Forest resources of the world” in 1948. This can be named as the “Era of Approximation” that relied on paper questionnaires sent to countries, focusing almost exclusively on forests as a source of industrial timber for post-war reconstruction.  

As the decades passed and the complexity of global forestry issues grew, the manual methods of the mid-20th century became insufficient. In the early 1980s, the Forest Resources Information System (Foris) was developed by the Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) Programme, officially entering service in 1983 as a computerized source of data on tropical forests. Foris marked an important step in moving global forest monitoring from subjective expert summaries toward a more systematic, digitalized approach. Technically, Foris was designed to store, edit and retrieve forest data resources, operating as a central database with a client application installed on users’ computers; in the early 2000s it was further complemented by a web application. 

FRA was pioneering in how it organized the world’s forest data, using a hierarchical classification that divided information into natural woody vegetation, forest formations (natural vs. man-made), and management classes. It operated through a rigorous standardized workflow: verified References led to a “Data Context” gateway, which connected national source data to “Derived Data” fit for standardized global reporting. Despite its architectural depth, Foris was a highly centralized tool; as late as June 1999, the system had only about 10 active users, primarily FAO staff in Rome responsible for manually entering and reclassifying country data.  

The paradigm shifted in 2005, as the FRA transitioned from a centralized, “FAO-driven” process to a “country-driven” model. Reporting was placed in the hands of a global network of officially nominated national correspondents, moving the legacy of Foris from an internal database into a collaborative system strengthening national ownership to simplify global data entry, the FRA platform. Since the launch of the FRA platform, it has been used by more than 110 000 users worldwide. However, this digital transition of FRA into a fully digital process was not without its hurdles; the efficiency of the review process was initially hampered by technical limitations that restricted the flow of communication between countries and reviewers. Furthermore, the online system did not yet provide a sufficiently well-developed and user-friendly database application to improve access to and use of FRA data—a realization that underscored the urgent need for the more flexible, open-source revolution already emerging in the field.  

The FRA online platform enabled the transition to a fully digital workflow for data entry, review, validation and dissemination. Built on open-source principles, it serves as the global repository for tabular forest statistics and provides a transparent environment where 342 officially nominated national correspondents and reviewers collaborate to ensure data consistency and reliability. While the FRA platform supports the global reporting process, it is closely linked to national forest monitoring and data collection systems, which are increasingly facilitated through the Open Foris ecosystem of solutions. 

Recognizing that nearly 80 percent of developing countries still struggled to collect basic information due to high costs and dependency on expensive commercial software, FAO officially launched the Open Foris initiative in 2009.  This marked a shift from earlier approaches focused mainly on storing and disseminating data, such as Foris, to providing a broader set of digital solutions that support countries in collecting, managing, analyzing and reporting their forest data. Open Foris was built as a set of open-source solutions, provided free to any country or community to remove dependencies, and foster self-sufficiency as a country-driven model. The Open Foris initiative empowers nations at the grassroots level to collect the actual raw data—through field surveys and satellite monitoring—required to produce those statistics in the first place. Together with FRA they ensure that the path from the forest floor to global accountability is completely transparent and country-owned. 

Today, Open Foris is stronger than ever, having evolved from early Linux command-line scripts, the Open Foris Geospatial Toolkit, into an “ecosystem of solutions”. This foundation developed into robust desktop applications which have evolved into a sophisticated initiative of web-based solutions and mobile applications designed for broader accessibility and collaborative environments, which now focus on innovative monitoring approaches, including the integration of artificial intelligence (AI).  

The widespread adoption of these solutions is underpinned by FAO’s work in capacity development, including trainings all around the world. This process is a two-way street; the ecosystem grows organically, ensuring that user feedback from country engagement directly drives the development of new functionalities to meet evolving forest monitoring needs and challenges. The impact is staggering: digital innovation has transformed the forest monitoring landscape, and Open Foris now serves 250 000 users across 196 countries and territories now utilize Open Foris solutions for climate reporting. 

Open Foris provides the specialized solutions needed to monitor the world’s forests through five key focus areas, beginning with field data collection where Arena Mobile and the map-first Ground app allow for the capture of precise, georeferenced information. The visual interpretation component enables users to analyse high-resolution satellite imagery using Collect Earth (desktop-based) or Collect Earth Online (CEO) (collaborative, web-based), supporting accurate, scalable land monitoring and assessment workflows. For robust data management, the initiative offers the cloud-based Arena platform for multi-user survey design and statistical analysis. Geospatial analysis is facilitated by System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing, and Analysis for Land Monitoring (SEPAL), which provides cloud-computing power for processing massive datasets, and Earth Map, which enables the visualization of global environmental and climate data for non-experts. Finally, integrated solutions and risk assessment are addressed by Whisp (“What is in that plot?”), a solution supporting deforestation compliance for transparent supply chains, and Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring (FERM), the official global platform for planning and reporting on the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and towards the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). 

By democratizing these innovative solutions, FAO is ensuring that forest monitoring is no longer a distant approximation but a transparent, country-driven reality. Together, we are turning data into decisions, paving the way for a future where every country and community has the power to protect our planet’s most vital ecosystems.