Abstract: Remote sensing via satellites has been the main method applied in forest pest and disease monitoring during the past thirty years and many theoretical and technological proposals have been launched. By analyzing the indices of decision and evaluation for forest pest and disease monitoring, we propose a novel solution for forest pest and disease monitoring, based on a wireless multimedia sensor network. We provide a system framework and emphasize the major issues, including hardware components of the wireless multimedia sensor network, the design of routing protocol, a reliable transmission mechanism for image data, a strategy for avoidance of congestion, the classification and comparison of images and the schematic deployment of nodes.