This information is part of the basis for decisions in forest and environmental policies of the United Nations and the European Commission. Our activities comprise

• The further development and coordination of the monitoring;
• The consolidation of monitoring data in a database;
• The scientific analysis of the data;
• The publication of the results. 

We have to continuously further develop the monitoring  because the political information needs vary with changing environmental conditions. While at the beginning of the work we had to study the extent and development of forest damage by air pollution, we are today increasingly being asked for relationships between forest monitoring, forest biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and climate change. For this reason our coordination activities comprise the development of monitoring methods harmonised across Europe as well as strict data quality control. The monitoring methods include annual crown condition assessments as well as assessments of the nutritional status of trees and of the condition of forest soils on 6800 plots across Europe. A particularly intensive monitoring aims at cause-effect relationships on 860 plots. On these plots crown condition, phenology, growth, and the nutritional status of the trees are assessed. Also included are litterfall, soil condition, soil solution chemistry, and the species diversity of the ground vegetation. Moreover data on meteorology, ambient air quality, and atmospheric deposition are assessed. The monitoring data are submitted online to our database by the forest research institutes of the participating countries. The scientific data analysis is primarily conducted by ourselves and by the research institutions participating in the forest monitoring programme. The documentation of the results includes annual reports on forest condition in Europe. Further information on the results and their implication for international forest and environmental policies can be learned from descriptions of our three current projects: