About
Open Foris Support is where people who use the Open Foris tools help each other. Ask about a problem you're stuck on, share what you've learned in the field, and find answers others have already worked out.
What is Open Foris?
Open Foris is an initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that develops free and open-source software for forest and land monitoring. Governments, research institutes, NGOs and students around the world use the tools for national forest inventories, land-use assessments and environmental reporting.
The tools this site covers include:
- Collect and Arena: design surveys and manage field inventory data, with Arena Mobile for collecting data in the field.
- Collect Earth and Collect Earth Online: assess land use and land-use change from satellite imagery.
- SEPAL: process satellite data in the cloud.
- Earth Map: explore environmental and climate data without coding.
- Whisp: check land areas for evidence of deforestation.
Why a question and answer site?
Manuals explain how a tool is meant to work. This site collects what happens when people actually use it: the error messages, the workarounds, the tips for a particular kind of survey or a slow internet connection. Every question and its best answers stay on one page, so the next person with the same problem can find the solution in a search instead of waiting for a reply.
Answers come from other users and from the Open Foris team. Good answers are voted up, the person who asked marks the one that solved the problem, and experienced members keep posts accurate as the tools change.
How to take part
- Search to see whether your question has been answered.
- Ask a question if it hasn't. Say which tool and version you use, what you tried and what happened.
- Answer questions about the tools you know, even with a partial answer or a pointer to the documentation.
- Vote and accept so the most useful answers are easy to find.
No reputation is needed to ask or answer. The FAQ explains how reputation, editing and moderation work.
Other places to look
- openforis.org: downloads, news and training material for every tool
- Collect Earth Online documentation
- Earth Map
- Open Foris on GitHub: source code and issue trackers
About this site
Open Foris Support runs on an open-source question and answer platform maintained by the Open Foris team (source code). Use of the site is subject to the Terms of Service.