Summary of accomplishments

The overall objective of COST Action E43 was to enhance national forest inventories (NFI) for purposes of national and global reporting. In the process of accomplishing this objective the Action promoted scientifically sound methods for assessing forest resources, forest carbon pools and forest biodiversity. Beginning with international reporting requirements and the current status and practices of the NFIs, COST Action E43 focused on establishing reference definitions that could be commonly accepted by the participants and that would be applicable for international reporting. As explained in the previous chapters, these definitions are called reference definitions. However, common agreement was not achieved for a small proportion of proposed reference definitions, leaving need for further work. In addition to establishing definitions, techniques were developed to convert estimates based on national definitions to estimates based on reference definitions. These techniques can be viewed either as an intermediate step on the way to adoption of reference definitions or as permanent solutions if a country chooses not to use the reference definitions. This chapter briefly summarizes the main accomplishments of COST Action E43 and identifies future challenges.