**1. Introduction**

The Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies—IDEAM (Spanish acronym) is the forestry authority in Colombia, among other responsibilities. Since 2012, in coordination with the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, the operation of the Forest and Carbon Monitoring System for Colombia, SMByC, began as a functional tool to generate annual official information on the monitoring of the forest cover and deforestation, early warnings for deforestation, and to estimate carbon stocks and GHG emissions related to natural forests.

The SMByC complies with the provisions of the relevant decisions of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—UNFCCC and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its guidelines of good practices, and operates under the principles of transparency, completeness, comparability, consistency and precision. Likewise, it complies with the requirements established by National Statistics Agency (DANE, Spanish acronym) to be considered as official information. For the generation of this type of information, the SMByC developed a specific methodology through a publicly available digital satellite image processing protocol [1, 4, 25] and updated in [23]. All the information generated by the SMByC is available on the Web page of the system, with the exception of the one that has restrictions on use, at link [2].

The information generated by the SMByC allows the IDEAM to carry out its mission activities to monitor the biophysical resources of the nation, especially those related to forest resources, generating statistics, reports, maps and official reports that give an account of their status and dynamics. More information on the indicators can be found in [3].

The main components of the SMByC are: (i) monitoring of forest/deforestation, (ii) monitoring of biomass in natural forests, and (iii) causes and agents of deforestation. The SMByC is an instrument that generates crucial information to design and implement national policies on climate change and forests.
