A framework for environmental monitoring information systems

Abstract

Human activity has changed and continues to change our natural environment in dramatic ways. There is a widespread degradation of wide areas on the Earth surface, that are the natural habitat of endangered animal and/or vegetable specimen, in term of water, air, and other natural resources. The conditions of life of human beings are also deteriorating at a fast pace. In order to fight against this fierce degradation, there is a great need of environmental monitoring systems. Society must track the real situation of its natural environmental resources, and this is accomplished only through the process of selecting the objects important to monitor, measuring their characteristics or attributes, analyzing all these data together or isolated, using mathematical models, statistics, simulation and other tools. In general there is some standard, goal or desired situation for the overall behavior of an environmental system and, against this standard, we must compare the data originated (raw data or transformed data) from real world. Data to be collected are usually geographically dispersed and are of different kinds, like temperature, water and air quality. They are acquired through specific sensors or measured and collected directly by researchers geographically distributed. Later on, the analyzed information may also be disseminated for researches, authorities and society in general. So, we propose an object oriented model that could be thought as a framework for every kind of environment monitoring information system. This model is Internet oriented, in the sense that the data to be collected can be geographically distributed. After its capture the data is sent, via Internet, to specifics data based management systems (DBMS) to be stored. After, this raw data can be disseminated also via Internet, to researchers or other interested people. Some analysis will be done with the spatial data stored in the DBMS and then presented to the users. With this framework, models could also be developed for different kinds of ecosystems and archived in a specific database aiming at being reused later