Abstract-The Member States ofthe European Union established

Program in 1989 with the aim to improve forest information in Europe and to facilitate the availability of the information. In 1994 the Space Applications Institute ofthe European Commission set up the Forest Information from Remote Sensing (FIRS) Project in order to support EFICS by developing methods for deriving forest informa-tion from earth qbservation data, principally mapped, geo-referenced information but also statistical data. Two studies carried out in the frame of these two activities clearly revealed the need for harmoniza-tion of the nomenclature and the defInitions and methods used for assessing the forest variables within the Pan-European area. As mapped forest information is lacking for most of Europe it has been considered practical to combine the provision of harmonized key variables with the development of methods for, eventually, providing the information in geo-referenced mapped format as derived from remotely sensed data. The use of earth observatio