Description: Canada's commitment to sustainability was enshrined in 1992 through the National Forest Strategy entitled “Sustainable Forests: A Canadian Commitment”. The National Forest Information System (NFIS), a Canadian Council of Forest Ministers initiative, is being developed to provide Canadians and the international community with authoritative information about the state of Canada's forests and how they are being sustainably managed.

Canada's forests cover almost 500 million hectares and stretch across the country. Responsibility for these forests falls under a great many jurisdictions and management agencies including governments, industry and other organizations. Forestry information is gathered in different ways, for different uses and is stored in different locations. As a result, accessing and integrating the information is extremely complex. NFIS is addressing these significant and wide-ranging differences by adopting international standards and by building a distributed network of servers and applications which allow access to forestry information held by independent agencies. NFIS provides Web tools - ranging from the simple portrayal of various maps to sophisticated analyses - to users from anywhere in the world, allowing greater access to and use of Canada’s forest information. How can the ICT product/innovation benefit the project? The Canadian FIS can serve as a role model for the development of similar Forest Information Systems across the world. Lessons can be learned for countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America on development of such portals and IMS platforms, including the choice of technology driving the FIS, and ways to visualize various categories and kinds of forestry-related datasets, including land cover, protected areas, carbon stocks, and biodiversity. The Canadian FIS is also a good example of three-tiered system, as the Canadian FIS serves national, provincial, and local level datasets. The national datasets are mostly public domain, while the local level datasets are available to local governments within particular provinces.