Overview

Forests in Armenia provide significant input to biodiversity conservation, national economy, rural livelihoods and cultural tradition. Forests also represent an important reservoir of sequestered carbon and provide a wide range of ecosystem services, e.g. clean water, erosion control, and wildlife habitat. During the last two decades Armenian forests are being degraded considerably - mainly by unsustainable logging, fuel wood extraction, overgrazing/trampling, and catastrophic events, like fires. Deforestation and forest degradation lead to the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, to reduced human well-being, and to the release of greenhouse gases. One of the root causes of forest degradation processes in Armenia is the lack of sustainable forest management in national forest policy and legislation as well as the lack of responsible and sustainable forest management standards and practices at public forestry units.
The provision of services serves to reach the component objective: “A sustainable forest management strategy has been introduced as a management scheme for forests in the South Caucasus.”
The main objective of the service is to develop a prototype version of the NFMIS compartment register including data form one State Forest Enterprise (SFE), to setup a web interface for the GIS System allowing for simple data entry functions and providing a number of thematic map outputs as specified below. Main purpose of the prototype is to demonstrate system functionality and provide a proof of concept for the NFMIS.