Arena is a modern, cloud-based platform designed for comprehensive forest and other environmental surveys, socio-economic surveys and other applications. It allows users to fully customise survey structures, variables, and validation rules, supporting multilingual data collection, management, and processing. Its dynamic form designer, taxonomy management, and real-time collaborative features make it ideal for both national forest inventories and complex, multi-cycle surveys. Arena supports importing old Collect surveys, connected with Earth Map and Whisp for Google Earth Engine queries, and it offers advanced data cleansing and export functions. Data is securely stored in the cloud, facilitating collaboration and reducing the need for local IT infrastructure.
Usage Areas
National forest inventory and monitoring programs- Collaborative, multi-user survey projects
- International reporting for NFMS, FRELs/FRLs, REDD+
- Projects requiring secure, cloud-based data management and real-time collaboration
GitHub
Manuals & Guides
Arena Mobile is a next-generation, cross-platform application (Android and iOS) for efficient field data collection. It is tightly integrated with Arena, allowing users to collect, validate, and synchronize data in real time or offline. Arena Mobile supports customizable data entry forms, georeferenced data collection, multimedia attachments (photos, audio), and complex validation rules. Its intuitive interface is designed for use in challenging field conditions, ensuring reliable data capture and seamless integration with cloud-based Arena projects. The mobile app is ideal for teams conducting large-scale inventories, restoration monitoring, or rapid assessments in remote areas.
Usage Areas
- Data collection in remote or low-connectivity environments
- Field teams conducting forest and land surveys
- Rapid data collection for ecosystem assessments
GitHub
Manuals & Guides
Materials & Resources
Open Foris Collect is the trusted desktop solution for field-based inventories worldwide. Proven through hundreds of real-world surveys, it offers a robust environment for designing complex questionnaires, managing diverse data types, and enforcing advanced validation rules. With its user-friendly interface and multilingual support, Collect helps teams turn field observations into reliable, consistent information — empowering better decisions on land, forest, and resource management.
Collect seamlessly integrates with other Open Foris solutions, such as Collect Earth for interpreting land use and land cover through satellite imagery. Data from Collect can also be migrated into Arena for multi-cycle inventories and long-term monitoring.
Open Foris Collect is a mature and field-proven application. While it will continue to receive occasional maintenance and bug fixes, no major updates or new features are planned.
For users developing new surveys not intended for Collect Earth, we recommend transitioning to Arena, the next-generation platform for survey design, data management, and analysis.
Usage Areas
- Office-based survey design and data management
- National forest and land use surveys
- Data quality assurance and reporting for REDD+ and climate commitments
GitHub
Manuals & Guides
Materials & Resources
Collect Earth is a free, open-source desktop tool for monitoring land with satellite images. It enables users to view, interpret, and record information using imagery from Google Earth Pro and Google Earth Engine. The solution is fully integrated with Open Foris Collect, which is used to design surveys with flexible structures and tailored objectives.
A key strength of Collect Earth is its ability to analyze land over time. By comparing historical and recent satellite images, users can track land-use changes such as deforestation, reforestation, and land degradation, and evaluate how landscapes evolve. This makes it valuable for forest monitoring, activity data collection, map accuracy assessments, project evaluation as well as for wider applications in agriculture, urban studies, and socio-economic surveys.
Usage Areas
- Remote sensing-based land-use/land-cover monitoring
- Land-use/land-cove change detection and validation
- Support for climate and national reporting
GitHub
Manuals & Guides
Materials & Resources
Collect Earth Online (CEO) is the next generation web-based platform for geospatial analyses that provides a free, open-source, intuitive interface for accessing and interpreting high-resolution satellite imagery through a variety of sources, including Planet and imagery through Google Earth Engine. Users can create questionnaires with varying levels of complexity to suit their needs and have collaborators collect data simultaneously. CEO can support a broad spectrum of applications including landscape change, land cover monitoring and deforestation studies. Researchers, practitioners, public servants, and other stakeholders of all technical levels can make use of CEO as a user-friendly tool to collect data on earth observations at scale.
Usage Areas
- Remote sensing-based forest and land cover monitoring
- Land use change detection and validation
- Support for REDD+ and national reporting
Manuals & Guides
Materials & Resources
Earth Map is a user-friendly, web-based tool for visualizing and analyzing global climate and environmental data. Developed in partnership with Google Earth Outreach, it allows users to access, visualize, and analyze a wide range of geospatial datasets, including climate variables, vegetation indices, and land cover data. Earth Map is designed for accessibility, requiring no specialized technical skills, and supports decision-making for land management, restoration, and climate adaptation. Its intuitive interface and powerful analytics make it suitable for both local communities and national agencies.
Usage Areas
- Rapid assessment of climate, vegetation, and land variables
- Visualization, analysis and data dissemination
- Support for evidence-based policy and project design
- On-the-fly statistics for e.g. temperature, precipitation, & land changes for chosen time period
Manuals & Guides
Materials & Resources
The FERM consists of a geospatial platform and a registry of restoration initiatives. It is the official monitoring platform for tracking global progress and disseminating good practices for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. It also supports countries in reporting areas under restoration for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework Target 2. The FERM Registry provides a harmonized data collection mechanism to aggregate data from restoration platforms.
Usage Areas
- Restoration Monitoring
- Good practices of restoration initiatives
- Reporting Restoration Progress
Manuals & Guides
Materials & Resources
Ground is an open-source, map-first data collection web console co-developed by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Google that enables non-technical users to easily create surveys and collect georeferenced field data via an Android app. It supports offline data entry with automatic syncing and provides real-time visualization through a web dashboard, where data can be downloaded in CSV or GeoJSON formats. Ground is designed for non-technical users, making field data collection easy and accessible. It supports sustainability monitoring, restoration, and training data collection. For example, it empowers smallholders to track value chains and drive impact at scale.
Usage Areas
- Sustainable Commodity Production and Supply Chains
- Land Use and Land Cover Assessments
- Environmental Monitoring and Conservation
- Machine Learning Training Data Collection
- Community-Based Monitoring
Materials & Resources
SEPAL is an open-source, cloud-based computing platform developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to enable efficient processing and analysis of satellite data for land and forest monitoring. Its primary purpose is to help countries, government agencies, researchers, NGOs, and academic institutions monitor land use, detect changes such as deforestation, and support restoration and climate action without needing advanced coding skills. SEPAL allows users to quickly access, analyze, and visualize high-resolution satellite imagery—enabling better policy decisions and improved reporting for international climate and sustainability goals. Key benefits include the ability to create custom maps, monitor land in near-real-time, and support robust, transparent land management strategies at local, national, and global scales
Usage Areas
- Forest and land monitoring
- Climate action
- Ecosystem restoration and reforestation planning
- Disaster risk management and fire monitoring
- Custom geospatial analysis and visualization
- Change detection and time-series analysis
GitHub
Manuals & Guides
Materials & Resources
What is in that plot is an open-source solution which helps to produce relevant forest monitoring information and support compliance with deforestation-related regulations. Whisp is robust, transparent, and replicable, built on interoperable open standards. All code is open, publicly available, and can be inspected, reproduced, and adapted on GitHub.
Numerous publicly available Earth Observation maps provide data on forests, land use, and tree cover. However, these maps often differ because they use various definitions and classification systems. As a result, no single map can provide a complete picture of any specific area. To address this issue, the Forest Data Partnership (FDaP) and the AIM4Forests Programme advocate for the Convergence of Evidence approach.
Usage Areas
- Transparent Supply Chains
- Digital Public Infrastructure
- Supporting Deforestation Compliance