ENVIRONMENT Computer forecasts enhance farm production and speciesdiversity.
Environmental scientists think of computers as old friends. They've longused them to crunch the
data they collect in the field, whether to map thehabitats of endangered species or predict the effects of greenhouse gasemissions on the global climate. But three trends are pushing informationtechnology from the periphery of environmental studies to its very core,according to the proponents of a
new field called environmental informatics, orenviromatics.First, there's a fresh avalanche of raw data about the environment, aproduct of networked sensors that monitor ecosystems in real time. Second,there's the rise of Internet standards such as the Extensible Markup Language(XML), which can tie together data stored in varying formats in differentlocations. The third trend -- the decreasing cost of computing power -- meansthat researchers can use inexpensive desktop machines to run analyses andsimulations that once required supercomputers. Just as the invention of fastgene sequencers a decade ago gave rise to bioinformatics, a new wealth of dataabout the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land is leading to a wider embrace ofsensing, simulation, and mapping tools -- and hopefully to more reliablepredictions about the future.Environmental modeling, of course, is nothing new: the ratification of theKyoto Protocol was spurred in part by global
climate models that predictaverage temperature increases of 1 °C to 6 °C over the next century. But suchlarge-scale, long-range climate models don't help with more immediate andlocal questions -- such as whether the humidity this month in Butler County, PA,means that
farmers should apply fungicides early to prevent infections. At Pennsylvania State University'sCenter for Environmental Informatics, researcher Douglas Miller is pouring datafrom weather stations throughout the wheat-growing states into a Web-basedprogram that can predict where a devastating wheat fungus infection calledfusarium head blight may strike next. Farmers can log into a website, entertheir locations and the flowering dates of their crops, and get local mapsshowing color-coded levels of risk. We're putting environmental informationinto people's hands so they can make decisions, says Miller.Enviromatics is even helping to manage urban growth. In San Diego County,officials compiled a detailed geographical and biological database mappingwhich vernal pools -- basins that fill with rainwater in the winter and spring-- harbor the most-endangered strains of species such as the San Diego fairy shrimp and therefore deservethe most protection. Science is rarely the main driver of land management orother decisions affecting the natural environment, but enviromatics may make itharder than ever for politicians to skirt the long-term implications of theirdecisions.
More abstracts about the Enviromatics