Environmental informatics: Advancing data intensive sciences to solve environmental problems

Abstract

The 21st Century witnesses emergence of geospatial cyberinfrastructure and other relevant geospatial technologies (Yang et al., 2010) for collecting data, extracting information, simulating phenomena scenarios, and supporting decision making (Caragea et al., 2005; Stadler et al., 2006). The advancements of the geospatial technologies not only provide great opportunities for us to better understand environmental issues and better position us to solve global to local environmental problems (Pecar-Ilic and Ruzic, 2006), but also pose great challenges for us to handle terabytes to petabytes of heterogeneous environmental data. Environmental informatics (Green and Klomp, 1998; Hilty, Page and Hrebícek, 2006) should be revisited to efficiently and effectively manage, integrate, and mine information and knowledge from the vast amount of data for supporting environmental decisions (Hey, Tansley and Tolle, 2008).