George Mitri is Full Professor and Director of the Land and Natural Resources Program at the Institute of the Environment, University of Balamand (UOB), Lebanon. George Mitri holds a PhD in Environmental Bio-monitoring from the University of Trieste. He teaches several courses in environmental sciences at the Division of Biology and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Sciences at UOB. Dr Mitri has more than 22 years of professional and research experience. His research interests lie in the area of Earth Observation and Geo-Information Analysis and their applications in climate related risk assessment, land cover/land use mapping and monitoring, forest management, wildfire risk assessment and management, drought and land degradation assessment, and impact of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems. He has been leading on various research and development projects funded by National and international organizations. He has more than 70 publications in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters. Dr Mitri is certified expert reviewer of National Inventories Reports in the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry sector under the United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Kyoto Protocol. He is a member of the National committee to combat desertification and climate change (Decision No 1/743 dated 17-8-2015) .Also, he is representative and member of the National Climate Change Coordination Unit (CCCU) at the Ministry of Environment (Registry 4244-7-11-2013). Dr. Mitri is fellow member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IU-8180) being a member of the Ecosystem Management Commission among others. In 2008, Dr. Mitri was entrusted to coordinate the development of Lebanon’s National Strategy for forest fire management (endorsed by the Council of Ministers Decision No 52/2009). In 2016, Dr. Mitri conceptualized and lead the development of an open-source application called Firelab (ioe-firelabbalamandeulb) for improved fire risk management across the country