About
Our natural environment is under increasing pressure from factors such as climate change, over-exploitation and competing demands. Sustainable management of our natural resources is of major importance to governments, industries and communities. In order to be effectively, efficiently and equitably manage these resources, accurate, defensible data and information will be vital.
We live in an age where our ability to collect and process data is improving exponentially. Environmental data are increasingly available through the introduction of new technologies (remote sensing, cheap in field sensors) and through government and non-government initiatives such us Open Data and Citizen Science. Decision makers, managers and researchers wanting answers to questions for environmental sustainability or management need to be able to discover, access and use this information. The Environmental Informatics Group helps them do this.
Vision and mission
We aim to leverage opportunities from the digital revolution to enable improved and sustainable management of natural resources by addressing challenges across the entire information supply chain, including social, technical and informational aspects.
We envisage a world where:
- Environmental data are shared – environmental research, policy development and management are not constrained by a lack of access to data or information
- Environmental data are transformed by trusted processes – those with a need, and the right to environmental information, are able to efficiently and effectively discover, access and use the information they need, as and when they need it, in a form that is useful to them
- Environmental knowledge is accessed and applied by decision makers – decisions about environmental resources are based on clear, consistent and current information.
Our mission is to partner with organisations to design, develop and apply tools and methods for the efficient discovery, access, generation, integration and delivery of data and information needed to understand and sustainably manage our environmental resources.
Our Expertise
We have expertise in the following areas:
- Environmental modelling and simulation
- Information architectures, infrastructures and data integration
- Social architectures for information infrastructure
- Data visualisation and analytics
- Web systems design and architectures
- Linked data and semantic web technologies
- Data and information engineering
- Geospatial data
- Development of data and information standards
- Machine learning and artificial intelligence
- Knowledge design and delivery
Members of the Group have been involved in environmental informatics for over 20 years. We are well connected across CSIRO (Oceans and Atmosphere, Minerals, Data61, IM&T), nationally (Commonwealth and state government agencies e.g. the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy,) and internationally (e.g. the Open Geospatial Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium and Earth Science Information Partners).
More info about our experts can be found here or find out more about our impact case studies here.