Environmental Monitoring

The activities carried on in monitoring the environment require extremely sophisticated means, including time and space instrumentation, analysis tools, integration and correlation of different data sources, reasoning, information and knowledge management. Communities in this area operate over a widespread geographic scale, global to regional to local. They must aggregate information derived both from historical files and from real time instruments. They hold specialised domain terminologies but must address multidisciplinary aspects. Finally they must integrate information acquired from different sources in different sites.

In this context existing infrastructures consist of operational tools and systems (e.g. those available at Civil Protections national centres) which often do not interface with the tools and systems of other institutions and relevant research centres. Especially where different stakeholders are located in different places there is an evident fragmentation of services, and scientific collaborations do not take advantage of shared spaces, resources and knowledge.

Large international initiatives, such as GMES and GEO, supported by the EC, all European National Institutions and by many other international organisations, focus on coordinating international efforts to environmental monitoring, i.e. to provide political and technical solutions to global issues, such as climate change adaptation, global environment protection, preservation of natural resources (air quality, marine environment, forest ecosystem) and humanitarian response.

More information about Environmental Monitoring at ESA.

More about the Implementation of Environmental Conventions (ImpECt) scenario.