The roles of community networks in environmental monitoring and environmental informatics

The increasing complexity of gathering and using all kinds of environmental information, as well as the decreased funding for these activities, have l ed to examples where local communities and community groups are taking the lead or are cooperating with government agencies to gather such information . Some issues that have emerged from these activities are: the validity, th e accuracy, and precision of measurements made by the groups; the ownership , legal status, and copyright status of the information; and the mechanisms for formatting, storage, backup, dissemination and use of this information in other applications. For the past 8 years, we have been designing and op erating different types of community networks and environmental monitoring programs with community groups, high schools, volunteer professionals and g overnment personnel. We have incorporated environmental information systems in Intranets for government use and ix public sites available over the Int ernet. We have tested many different methods for data acquisition, storage, manipulation, and delivery. We have measured the statistical variations fo und between high school students' and professionals' monitoring activities. At the same time, one of us (C.I. Mayfield) has been involved with the des ign of environmental information systems for developing countries around th e world. In this article, we present some of our results and general conclu sions from that body of work. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights res erved.