At least 120 research establishments in 14 countries of the Asia and the Pacific region are engaged in research on various aspects of forestry. The range of activities carried out by these institutions is extremely wide. Most deal with applied research in the fields of silviculture, mensuration, forest utilization, forest botany, forest entomology, forest pathology, plantation forestry, agroforestry and tree improvement. Assessment of the properties and uses of timber and research into seasoning, treatment, wood working and basic processing is also carried out by several of these institutions. Some are also involved in research on pulp and paper.
Some institutions house important herbaria and natural history museums.
Hundreds of universities, located in Asia and abroad, award M.Sc, and Ph.D. degrees to students who carry out forestry research. Even in the fledgling forestry faculty of Sri Jayawardanapura in Sri Lanka, opened in 1983, as many as 30 dissertations on forestry-related subjects found academic acceptance during the period 1983 to 1990. Programme of Unesco supported research on lowland dipterocarp forests. However, although development assistance in the forestry sector has expanded rapidly in the past few years, the total percentage of total external funding earmarked for forestry research in developing countries is only 5 percent. By comparison, the percentage of total agricultural assistance allocated for agricultural research rose from about 4 percent during the 1970s to about 10 percent in the 1980s.