Mar 16 2008
Image Credit: Denis Burdin/Shutterstock.com
Article updated on 21/01/20 by Ben Pilkington
Environmental informatics, or enviromatics for short, is an integral part of contemporary applied informatics which provides methodological support for the employment of computers to analyze environmental data, protect our environment and identify and limit the environmental impact of information technology.
Enviromatics involves the fields of computer science, climatology, meteorology, economics, biology, chemistry, physics, ecology, and other related areas. Tools, techniques, and methods from computer science, together with information and communication technologies, are used to examine environmental data, and support and initiate procedures for information processing to explore, avoid, and restrict the destruction and degradation of our natural environment.
The main purpose of enviromatics is to provide knowledge and support to decision-makers about the environment with the technical, economic, social and ecological objects of developments and projects.
Enviromatics has been and will be of interest to an increasing number of institutions and people who are dedicated to the protection and preservation of ecosystems on a local, regional and planetary scale. Enviromatics has also been employed to manage urban growth and development, and to advise governments on policy planning and implementation. It can reveal the consequences of long-term decisions in land management and other decisions that will affect the natural environment.
Enviromatics was first developed in the early 1990s in Central European research centers (Page and Wohlgemuth, 2010). Since then, several global initiatives to use informatics to help guide environmental policy and planning decisions have been developed. Examples include the US National Science Foundation’s DataONE project, an access-providing platform for meteorological observation data, and Data Conservancy, which is building data curation infrastructure to enable more efficient work in this field.
References and Further Reading
Page, B., and Wohlgemuth, V. (2010). Advances in Environmental Informatics: Integration of Discrete Event Simulation Methodology with ecological Material Flow Analysis for Modelling eco-efficient Systems. Procedia Environmental Sciences, 2, pp.696–705.