The following hands-on session addressed challenges and opportunities for integrating forest biomass information from forest inventories, national statistics and Earth Observation to strengthen the monitoring and reporting of forest biomass for environmental assessments and climate action. It started with a review of the latest recommendations on using EO-based biomass products within MRV processes and international frameworks. Building upon recent discussions led by the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI), three different pathways leading towards the integration of these datasets were discussed, namely: 

1. Key considerations informing the design of new ground-based campaigns to ensure both compatibility with and added value from EO datasets

2. Lessons learned from experiences combining and harmonizing different existing in-situ data (e.g., National Forest Inventories, among others) for their integration with EO datasets

3. Assessment of inferential strategies for the integration of EO-based biomass datasets with in-situ data to enhance the precision of biomass estimates at different geographical scales. These discussion topics aim to support a broad range of end users in biomass estimation for forest monitoring and management purposes. 

The workshop started with short presentations highlighting success stories and state-of-the-art examples on these themes, followed by a short round of questions. Afterwards, three parallel round-table discussion groups were held, focusing respectively on the three pathways for conceiving the integration of in-situ data, EO-based biomass datasets and national statistics. The session concluded with summary presentations from the three discussion groups, followed by closing remarks and next steps. Results from these discussions aim to support a broad range of end users in biomass estimation for forest monitoring and management purposes, and its outcomes will contribute to ESA's ongoing work on forest monitoring.

A summary of workshop discussions will be available soon.