In recent years, satellite remote sensing has become a new tool for estimation of forest condition. Summary information about potential application of satellite data in forestry is presented in the paper. The main areas of their application are focused to assessment of vegetation cover and tree species composition, forest damage, modeling of carbon cycle and assessment of some chemicals in vegetation. Another application is estimation of some stand variables (age structure, stocking, growing stock, production) employing spectral reflectance models derived from satellite data. With respect to recent research in this area, the models precision is not very favorable, but they are efficient tool for application of some sampling methods (two-phased sampling). The optimization of sampling could save about 40 % costs of the terrestrial estimation.