FRA Nepal project is a bilateral co-operation between Governments of Nepal and Finland for five years (2010 – 2014) to conduct forest resource assessment over the entire country. Key objectives of FRA Nepal project are: strengthening institutional capacity building, maintaining forestry sector information systems, collecting data of all forest based resources and data sharing among forestry organizations. Climate Change and REDD are gaining more importance and they demand updated forest cover map and fresh data on forest, biomass and soils. National level baseline data collection is carried out by using Remote sensing technology and ground based sampling. The FRA Nepal Project is implemented under the Ministry of Forests and Soil Conservation (MFSC) and the Department of Forest Research and Survey (DFRS) is the executing organization.

The new global issues such as Climate Change (CC) and REDD+ are gaining more importance in international cooperation and entail more national attention. This project aims to collect national level baseline information required for REDD+ and institutionalize the Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system. Forest resource assessment, forest cover mapping, open source forest information system and project management are four key components of the project, each of which will contribute to achieve the specified objective.

Assessment of Data Needs: P. Kandel Working paper on LiDAR mapping in Nepal : B. Gautam, P.kandel