3. Organizing Existing Information

The ability to organize and use the existing information in planning and decision making is an important milestone in the capacity development process. In the post-UNCED period, the scope of forestry has become very wide and covers “the entire range of environmental and development issues and opportunities, including the right to socio-economic development on a sustainable basis”. This implies that forest planning must be carried out in a holistic manner by pooling together relevant data of other sectors such as climate, demography, economics, and society. Another interesting development is the view of forests as an ecosystem, which adds time as an important dimension of forest observations and makes historic information of great value. The Chapter emphasizes the value of existing information and illustrates the use of modern tools like remote sensing, geographic information system (RS & GIS), database management system (DBMS) and modelling for collecting, organizing and using the existing information in the planning process.