Information Technologies in Environmental Engineering

Information technologies have evolved to an enabling science for natural resource management and conservation, environmental engineering, scientific simulation and integrated assessment studies. Computing plays a significant role in every day practices of environmental engineers, natural scientists, economists, and social scientists. The complexity of natural phenomena require interdisciplinary approaches, where computing science offers the infrastructure for environmental data collection and management, scientific simulations, decision support, documentation and reporting. Ecology, environmental engineering and natural resource management comprise an excellent real-world testbed for IT system demonstration, while bring up new challenges for computer science. Complexity, uncertainty and scaling issues of natural systems set up a demanding application domain for modelling, simulation and scientific workflows; data management and reporting; decision support and intelligent systems; distributed computing environments; geographical information systems; heterogeneous systems integration; software engineering; accounting systems; control systems, as well as sustainable manufacturing and reverse logistics. This books offers a collection of papers presented at the 5th International Symposium on Environmental Engineering, held in July 2011, in Poznan, Poland. Recent success stories in ecoinformatics, promising ideas and new challenges are discussed among computer scientists, environmental engineers, industrial engineers, economists and social scientists, demonstrating new paradigms for problem solving and decision making.