A recent presentation by Peter Toome from Adcon Telemetry Australia at the Living Laboratories Workshop on Emerging Technologies in Environmental Monitoring highlighted to me the rapid increase in interest and capability in using the magic of the internet to distribute, collect, display and analyse environmental data.

Other examples include:

• Sahul-time – is a Monash University research project that presents an interactive model of the Australia/PNG continent over the last 100,000 years. A control panel allows a user to quickly move back and forwards through time. As you do, the coastline changes, showing how we were once linked to Papua New Guinea. Scientists are adding links to their archaeological data, so that now a user can find what archaeological data exists at various timescales in Australia’s history
• nrmSPACE has been developed by the South East Natural Resource Management Board as a tool for environmenal managers in this region of South Australia. It includes a database of research publications, an online collaborative space and most impressively, an interactive map that links a user to environmental datasets relevant to the region.
• Jim Rowe from SRA Information Technology also gave a presentation at the Living Laboratories workshop on Emerging Technologies in Environmental Monitoring. His presentation demonstrated how data could be collected and displayed on a GIS interface in real time. SRA won the Telstra Business of the Year award in 2007. Well done Jim!
• Mike Seyfang recently drew my attention to a new innovation by education.au Ltd Australia called openDSM, a lightweight fast search protocol across multiple distributed education repositories (digital libraries, cultural image libraries, metadata repositories, learning object repositories).
• Chris Raymond is a member of the Landscape Values Institute. He and his colleagues have developed a tool for collecting and collating information on what the community values in an environment, which is being used to help make decisions on where to invest resources in environmental management.  For more information on this, you can read their draft report (pdf 3.6MB) on this tool.

These new tools offer an exciting possibility for environmental managers to be much better informed about how to invest their resources in managing our environment and natural resources. Yet Australia is in danger of being a leading “primary producer” of environmental data (attribution to Alan Cooper, University of Adelaide), but with little or no value added to the data. As a country, we need to quickly adopt these new internet-based tools for distributing, displaying, analysing and collecting data. In particular, government agencies who are custodians of large environmental datasets need to release this information freely on the internet and allow environmental managers, academics, other agencies and entrepreneurs to add value.