Andreas Schuck – författare

Over the past two decades various European forest information projects have had the vision to build a distributed Europe forest information network, in which existing data can be identified and made available to a community of users. One of these projects was the Network for a European Forest Information Service (NEFIS). It ran from 2003 to 2005. The results of NEFIS are the subject of this report. The project explored an overall information system architecture based on existing data reporting structures at national, EU and international levels. Development of a metadata schema to enable discovery of resources was a second important step. An advanced demonstration version of a European forest information system was developed. It consists of three main components: (1) resource discovery catalogue based on the NEFIS metadata schema; (2) a visualization toolkit allowing for exploratory data analysis; and (3) a remote search demonstrator presenting an example of how distributed data sets can be identified, compiled and analysed. The example of the remote search used forest inventory data from six European countries. The report includes a set of considerations for the development of an operational forest information system. More information on the project outputs can be found at www.efi.int (search for nefis).

This book is the only in its kind to review the commodity coding, definitions and methodology applying to the collection of forest products production and trade statistics. The analysis - both qualitative as quantitative - contains valuable information for anybody who want to gain more insight in the methodology behind the figures. Recommendations are made for improving the data collection framework. Special attention has been given to the comparability of commodity coding systems, comparability of terms and definitions at the national and international levels, conversion factors to convert volume and weight, double counting and the coverage of production and trade of tropical timber and its products.This relates to the efforts of the ECE, FAO, EUROSTAT and ITTO who jointly collect such statistics from their member states, with the aim to streamlining the collection process and to reducing the burden for their statistical correspondents.Data on commercial trade of all commodities, among which forest products, is also collected by UN - COMTRADE and Eurostat - COMEXT. The possible use of their data for reporting to the joint questionnaire is used.