The environmental data deluge-sinking or swimming?

Abstract

Technological advances in sensing, data acquisition, and mobile devices are leading to increasing amounts of environmental data being sampled more rapidly and comprehensively than ever before, and environmental monitoring is benefiting from these advances. If we are to acquire novel insights and knowledge from these data, it needs to be matched by innovations in data management, storage and retrieval and ultimately in data analytics and inference.? This is the world of knowledge creation and data-driven discovery. The many forms of environmental data, their complexity and variations present challenges, including making model-based inferences about patterns in the presence of uncertainty which then need to be communicated and visualized for different audiences.