The Global Forest Resources Assessment of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) celebrates its 70th Anniversary in 2018. FAO's forestry department whishes to commemorate this important occurrence with a special publication on the history of the past 70 years of Global Forest Resources Assessemnt.

The publication was launched at the Global Symposium on Soil Organic Carbon (GSOC) held at FAO headquarters (Rome, 21-23 March 2017). It provides an overview to decision-makers and practitioners of the main scientific facts and information regarding the current knowledge and knowledge gaps on Soil Organic Carbon.

Asian dust events are massive meteorological phenomena during which dust particles from Chinese and Mongolian deserts are blown into the atmosphere and carried by westerly winds across Northeast Asia. Recently, there has been steady increase in both the frequency and the severity of Asian atmospheric dust events.

Urban residents’ health depends on green infrastructure to cope with climate change. Shrinking cities could utilize vacant land to provide more green space, but declining tax revenues preclude new park development—a situation pronounced in Japan, where some cities are projected to shrink by over ten percent, but lack green space.

This paper presents an evaluation of the multi-source satellite datasets such as Sentinel-2, Landsat-8, and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) with different spatial and temporal resolutions for nationwide vegetation mapping. The random forests based machine learning and cross-validation approach was applied for evaluating the performance of different datasets.

In this study, we compared pixel-based image analysis and object-based image analysis (OBIA) as methods of land cover classification of urban areas, using high resolution digital aerial photography.

To understand the rainfall-runoff process and sediment delivery process in headwater catchment, hydrological observation and the monitoring of suspended sediment concentrations (SSC) was conducted at a forested headwater catchment in Japanese Alps region. The study site is Nodagasawa watershed (37 ha) within Terasawayama Station, Research Forest of Shinshu University, Japan.

This study aims to understand the effective management of abandoned properties such as forest, farmlands, houses in depopulated areas in Japan. Specifically, this study focuses on 'absentee landlords' who own their property away from their current residence.