Environmental informatics - a new paradigm for coping with complexity in nature

The application of information technology to environmental issues is changing both theory and practice. The idea of "natural computation" provides new ways to understand environmental complexity across the entire range of scales, from individual phenotype to bio geography. Understanding the ways in which local interactions affect the global composition and dynamics of whole communities is crucial to the viability of strategies to manage ecosystems, especially in landscapes altered by human activity. Also environmental planning and management are increasingly dependent on accurate, up-to-date information that sets local decisions within a global context. The Internet makes it possible to combine environmental data from many different sources, raising the prospect of creating a global information warehouse that is distributed amongst many contributing sites.