This volume includes contributions to a symposium entitled State of the Art in Vegetation Monitoring Approaches and organized by the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Birmensdorf, Switzerland, on March 24-26, 2003. The papers cover a wide range of topics, from scale problems and other theoretical issues to the most practical questions of data quality. Several contributions rely on remotely sensed data. Sampling design and statistical analysis are of primary concern in many articles. Most papers concentrate upon the observation of biological variables, some are motivated by nature conservation efforts. The book may be useful to plant ecologists, vegetation scientists and practitioners in the fields of remote sensing and nature conservation. The book is richly illustrated by black and white and color photographs. Elizabeth Feldmeyer-Christe is associated researcher at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf. Her research focuses on the dynamics of plant communities in mire ecosystems and disturbance response in vegetation. She is active in the monitoring project of the Swiss mires, a project that combines image classification and predictive vegetation mapping. Sucharita Ghosh is a Mathematical Statistician at the WSL, Switzerland. Her research interests include Analysis of space-time observations, Fourier and Laplace transforms, Nonparametric curve fitting and Goodness-of-fit methods. She has written several papers in these and related fields and collaborated internationally. Currently she serves in the editorial board of the WSL journal Forest Snow and Landscape Research. Otto Wildi is head of the research division “Landscape" at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland. In his research at WSL, he elaborated concepts of landscape-survey while developing and publishing designs for spatial databases. He is permanent lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich since 1988, where he teaches survey methods and statistical analysis for ecologists. His recent interests in research concern spatial and temporal processes in vegetation systems. Apart from pattern recognition, he has experience in the development of dynamic models of ecosystems. Niklaus E. Zimmermann is a research scientist and project leader at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland. He is an expert in statistical, dynamical and GIS-assisted landscape and vegetation modelling, climate mapping, and remote sensing. His current work focuses on monitoring and modelling of landscape change and species distributions. Janos Podani is professor at Department of Plant Taxonomy and Ecology, Eotvos University, Budapest. Author of many papers and books on classification, ordination, sampling and pattern analysis of plant communities. Founding editor of the journal Community Ecology.