GIS Application in Environmental Management: A Review

Abstract

The role of environmental management is extremely important in human life because of its contribution to environmental protection and strategies. In modern society, nevertheless, facing the challenges in land, water, and air quality management in reality is unavoidable. Understanding the information on variability and features of environmental issues is necessary to support decision-makers in establishing environmental management planning. Spatial information and data should be considered as basic initial knowledge of environmental management. Among various technologies, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is known as one of the most popular tools to store, analyze, and visualize data relating to geographically referenced information which can mitigate these challenges more effectively and accurately. The main purpose of this paper is to emphasize how GIS applications in environmental management, discuss the challenges of GIS technology in environmental management, and provide recommendations for future research directions. Many articles over the last decades were reviewed to highlight the application of GIS in environmental management. These results indicated GIS applications support land, water, air quality, and waste management. Moreover, it is a useful tool to monitor and assess environmental quality and in environmental planning and decision-making. For the limitation of GIS application, it is obvious that accuracy assessment and sensitivity analysis should be noticed and assessed although GIS application may strongly support decision-making in environmental management. Emerging GIS technologies and tendencies could help address these challenges. In future, GIS should be integrated along with new technologies and different decision-making algorithms in further steps for developing and supporting spatial decision-support systems more efficiently.