19 December 2014, Foresteurope news - The writing phase of the preparation of the next edition of the State of Europe's Forests (SoEF) report has just started.

FOREST EUROPE Liaison Unit Madrid is responsible for the production of the 2015 edition of the report, which is being carried out with the cooperation of the UNECE/FAO Forestry and Timber Section, the FAO FRA Team, and the European Forest Institute (EFI).

Reporting for the SoEF is based on the improved set of Pan-European Criteria & Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management (SFM), and is done through different questionnaires on Quantitative Indicators, and on Qualitative Indicators for SFM.

National correspondents from the 46 FOREST EUROPE signatory countries are invited to provide information on the status and changes of their forests, their management and applied policies.  Information for the report is also provided by the European Commission (as signatory member of FOREST EUROPE) and several international data providers (EUROSTAT, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, ICP-Forests, Bioversity International and UNECE).

At this point, and while the data for the quantitative indicators is still being collected, the collection of the qualitative information is almost finished.  This has allowed the analysis and writing phase for the qualitative indicators for SFM to be started.

Experts from EFI, FAO, the University of Freiburg, the Russian Research Institute for Silviculture and Mechanization of Forestry, the Wageningen University and Research Centre, the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation, and the University of Lleida are taking part in this phase of the process.

The 2015 edition of the SoEF report will be released at the 7th FOREST EUROPE Ministerial Conference, which will take place in October 2015 in Madrid, Spain.

Source: http://www.foresteurope.org/news/writing-kicks-state-europe%E2%80%99s-forests-report-2015