Last November, the European Commission proposed a regulation to establish a coordinated monitoring framework for resilient forests using a combination of imagery from the European Union’s Copernicus Earth-observation satellites and in situ data, mainly from national forest inventories. The proposal is based on the premise that forest monitoring in Europe is “fragmented and patchy”, with no fully developed “consistent, transnational data-gathering approach”.

This premise, however, is misleading. In 1986, the commission launched a coordinated forest monitoring scheme, which evolved in cooperation with the…