Managing this information so it can be accessed and used by people working on forests around the world is a major challenge. One organization leading the way in meeting this challenge is the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO).

The major problem facing information-seekers world-wide, according to the IUFRO website, is locating information sources corresponding to their needs. Equally important, information-providers often have difficulty finding appropriate fora for presenting their information, which then remains inaccessible to others.

To help address these problems, IUFRO convened a consortium of international, regional and national organisations to set up the IUFRO Task Force on Global Forest Information Service (GFIS). This is an important initiative. But if it is to succeed it must engage the widest possible partnership base. CIFOR is helping to achieve this aim by helping establish GFIS in Asia.

Although national forestry departments and related organizations in Asia have been doing a lot of work at the national level, there has been very little integration or exchange of information between them, according to Michael Hailu, CIFOR’s Director of Information Services and a member of the GFIS Steering Committee.

“CIFOR volunteered at the 2003 GFIS Meeting in Quebec to assist IUFRO in extending GFIS’s reach into Asia. Our first initiative was to hold the first GFIS Asia meeting at our headquarters in Indonesia. This attracted Forestry Information Systems specialists from across Asia and really brought home how important and how useful it would be if countries in the region could better exchange forestry-related data and information,” Hailu said.

According to CIFOR’s Information Systems Specialist, Joris Siermann, GFIS Asia’s goals include strengthening the partnership within twenty Asian countries by building a network of forestry institutions, strengthening IT infrastructure and enhancing GIS capacity building by twenty percent.

“It is still early days for GFIS Asia, so the main priority has been defining common objectives and developing a work plan. But it won’t be long before GIFS Asia starts paying dividends,” Siermann said.

“There are many advantages for forestry departments and related institutions in participating in GFIS Asia. The most obvious ones are exchanging experience and ideas on best-practice in forest information management and improving access to information to help improve forest management.”

“I also hope membership GFIS Asia will improve access to international donor agency and funding opportunities,” Siermann said. According to Hailu, a key emphasis is building capacity, particularly in regards to the tools and protocols already available for sharing information.

“CIFOR has already been doing that in some of its work with Asian partners. But ultimately the main aim is to improve forest management by finding maximum interoperability between countries and institutions via the rapid dissemination of metadata and metadata management tools - not just within Asia, but between Asia and the rest of the world,” Hailu said.

Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry has expressed its interest in participating in GFIS activities and will work closely with CIFOR to organize a workshop for early 2005 at the Ministry to promote GFIS on a national level.

In the meantime, GFIS has been embraced as a joint initiative with the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, a partnership of 14 major forest-related international organizations, institutions and convention secretariats. The goal of embracing GFIS as a CPF initiative is to support UNFF and its member countries by further increasing the competence of CPF in accessing and managing forest-related information.

“As a result of this decision, which was presented at the CPF meeting in New York in September this year, CIFOR is working closely with IUFRO and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to further develop GFIS as a CPF initiative” Siermann said.