On the global scale, tropical forests are currently facing greater threats than at any time in history, with many areas undergoing rapid deforestation, degradation or loss of quality as a result of human activity. The importance of halting and reversing this cycle of destruction is well recognised, along with making sustainable forest management the main aim of development policies.
Since 1993 remote sensing and aerial photographic technology was used for the first time in Brazil for the protection of national parks and monitoring burning of vegetation.
The Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) project of FAO initiated in 1990 has demonstrated that with the help of remote sensing, information on changes in forest and land use could be obtained on a global basis in a cost-effective, timely and statistically sound manner. To address information needs of the international community for studies on global changes, FAO has decided to continue to implement FRA on a regular basis in order to build consistent and reliable time-series observations of forest and land use. FAO is currently executing the global forest resource assessment for the year 2000 (FRA 2000) which relies on the use of remote sensing for many of its components, ranging from coarse resolution global coverage for land cover mapping to high and very high resolution multi-date satellite imagery for surveying global and regional forest/land cover changes.