Advances in environmental information management

摘要

Environmental informatics lies at the intersection of environmental science and computer science, and enables new advances in environmental research through the application of computing techniques. Advances in computing and themanagement of environmental information have allowed remarkable new discoveries in the environmental sciences that impact society, for example advances in our ability to predict infectious disease (c.f., Peterson et al., 2004) and climate change (c.f., Cheung et al., 2009). The field of environmental informatics is rapidly growing with vast amounts of data streaming in real or near real time from sensors complimenting datasets elaborately gathered by researchers in the field and the laboratory. Technologies for handling this deluge of data have been forthcoming, but gaps in techniques and technology still are prevalent. For example, most commercially-available software systems for collecting streaming data from environmental sensors do not interoperate with one another, and the critical details regarding data collection that are necessary for long-term data preservation are not captured by mainstream data management applications.