Welcome to the GFIS Blog!

From the 13-15 of September in Nastola, Finland delegates from all over the world joined together in conversation as the expert consultation on A Long-Term Strategy for Global Forest Resources Assessment. Discussions surrounded the topic of forest related information and what to collect, how best to collect it, and through which means to report it. See the FRA website for more information and past publications. 

The Global Forest Information Service was invited to participate in sessions about sharing international forest-related data and the opportunities and challenges to primary data exchange. Later Communications Officer, Michael Huck, participated in a Knowledge Fair and was able to introduce GFIS to a number of the participants at the conference.

Michael (wearing green) speaks to a handful of interested onlookers about GFIS's mission and the value the website holds to its information partners.

Michael goes into detail with Greg Reams of the US Forest Inventory and Analysis about the functionality of GFIS and how users can create custom RSS feeds based on their search results.

During the the Knowledge Fair a number of people who had never heard of GFIS were happy to hear about the growing progress of the initiative and commented on how valuable a resource it could be for them in the future.As always the GFIS team was happy that it could educate people and brings its expertise on sharing forest related information in an online context.

Please visit back to our Blog in November where we will post about workshops with both North Korean and Chinese representatives in Beijing in the week prior to the Asia-Pacific Forestry Week. One of these workshops will be streamed live online for all those interest to see! More information coming soon. In addition we will be sharing a booth with our fellow IUFRO colleagues at the APF week bring the face of GFIS with us.