The Perspectives of Environmental Informatics and Systems Analysis

Information technologies are under extraordinarily rapid progress, and a number of them have not been ap-plied to environmental management. In many cases, however, the roles of these technologies have been limited in the provi-sion of improved convenience for system implementation and the generation of nicer presentation of system inputs and out-puts. Although these roles are meaningful for extensive transfer of new methodologies and convenient access of research outcomes, they do not directly contribute to methodology development. Therefore, further development of the high perform-ance computing and knowledge management potentials associated with artificial intelligence techniques is desired to pro-mote long-term viability of the environmental informatics. In this paper, recent developments, advancements, challenges, and barriers associated with practices of environmental informatics research were analyzed. A number of related methodolo-gies, applications, and policy considerations were examined. Issues of the needs for environmental systems analysis, the challenges of environmental systems modeling, and the impacts of environmental informatics were discussed. Perspectives of the environmental decision-making in 21st century were investigated, demonstrating many demanding areas for enhanced research efforts.