ME 567 Environmental Informatics: Background and Rationale

Industrialisation over the past century has lead to major perturbation of the environment (air, land and water).
The size of the environmental impact has grown from local (spills, sooty smoke stacks, garbage dumps) to regional (acid rain, ozone, Mediteranean pollution) and global (greenhouse effect, ozone hole, deforestation).

By the1960s, public concern about the declining quality of the environmental resources has lead to the environmental movement.
As a consequence, major environmental protection programs (regulations, public interest groups, industrial emission control) have been implemented.

Technological breakthroughs in computer and communication over the past decades has lead to the emergance of the post-industrial information age.
There was a dramatic rise in the quantity and diversity of environmental information. Automatic monitors on the earth's surface and in space have been producing literally astronomical quantities of environmentally sensed data.
We are now unable to "ferment" the raw environmental sensory data into useful "actionable" knowledge that is useful for environemntal management.
The infoglut just adds to the environmental pollution.
Environmental and related sciences have also produced large quantities of in-depth knowledge, but much of it is fragmented, scattered over many fields, hidden behind a heterogeneous nomenclature and otherwise inaccessible.

The shape, size and complexity of environmental problems has caused environmental monitoring, research and decisionmaking to be conducted by increasingly larger groups of people, distributed by geography, affiliation, and "native tongue."
Prudently managing the environmental problems has become technically and politically complex.
Given a fuzzy technical understanding of the causes, effects and mediating options, many of the environmental issues are managed using mainly intuitive and political arguments.
Current environmental management practices are suboptimal.