Information Integration for Environmental Monitoring and Assessment: An Annotated Bibliography

Annual federal and state investments in the collection, storage, and maintenance of resource and environmental data are enormous (estimated in the range.of a few to tens of billions of dollars). Despite these investments, the use of information from these databases for societal endpoints has been limited. Further research to evaluate the utility of large environmental databases in the analysis of selected scientific and regulatory questions therefore would be timely. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide an annotated review of selected literature on the topic of information integration in the context of environmental monitoring and assessment. Based on a review of this literature, significant scholarly contributions to this field have been identified as falling into the following four issue areas: institutional, resource/ecological, design, and technological. The publications are grouped, indexed, associated with keywords and organized under these four major issue areas. Within the four first-tier categories, we have identified several second-tier keywords to define more precisely the content of the title being classified. The present collection, accumulated over two years, is comprehensive, although not exhaustive. As we identify and accumulate additional literature, the classification system will evolve to reflect the content of the new titles.