Information technologies have evolved to an enabling science for natural resource management and conservation, environmental engineering, scientific simulation and integrated assessment studies. Computing plays a significant role in every day practices of environmental engineers, natural scientists, economists, and social scientists. The complexity of natural phenomena requires interdisciplinary approaches, where computing science offers the infrastructure for environmental data collection and management, scientific simulations, decision support documentation and reporting.

Ecology, environmental engineering and natural resource management comprise an excellent real-world testbed for IT system demonstration, while raising new challenges for computer science. Complexity, uncertainty and scaling issues of natural systems form a demanding application domain for sensor networks and earth observation systems; modelling, simulation and scientific workflows, data management and reporting, decision support and intelligent systems, distributed computing environments, geographical information systems, heterogeneous systems integration, software engineering, accounting systems and control systems.

This books offers a collection of papers presented at the 4th International Symposium on Environmental Engineering, held in May 2009, in Thessaloniki, Greece. Recent success stories in ecoinformatics, promising ideas and new challenges are discussed among computer scientists, environmental engineers, economists and social scientists, demonstrating new paradigms for problem solving and decision making.

Inhalt
Keynotes.- Ecological Informatics: Current Scope and Future Directions.- Semantically driven meta-modelling: automating model construction in an environmental decision support system for the assessment of ecosystem services flows.- Regular papers.- Governance of a Service-Oriented Architecture for Environmental and Public Security.- Integration of Environmental Management Information Systems and ERP systems using Integration Platforms.- State of the art and future research in Environmental Management Information Systems - a systematic literature review.- AKX An Exchange for Predicting Water Dam Levels in Australia.- Environmental Engineering and Facility Management of Berlin's Public Buildings.- Spatial disaggregated emissions inventory for Cyprus.- A web-based information system rating regional projects by considering sustainable development.- Development of a Spatial Decision Support Framework for IMPETUS project in West Africa.- Development of a decision support system for the operation of thermal power plants in Western Macedonia.- Towards a Novel Early Warning Service for State Agencies: A Feasibility Study.- Application of Optimization Algorithms for the Improvement of Water Quality Monitoring Systems.- SQCB - Sustainability Quick Check Tool for Biofuels.- Volatile Organic Compounds measurements at schools in Kozani, Greece.- NoiseTube: Measuring and mapping noise pollution with mobile phones.- Monitoring of environment by energy efficient usage of Wireless Sensor Networks.- Plant Phenotyping with Low Cost Digital Cameras and Image Analytics.- Reproducing human decisions in reservoir management: the case of lake Lugano.- Predicting chemical parameters of the water from diatom abudance in lake Prespa and its tributaries.- Analysing chromatographic data usingdata mining to monitor petroleum content in water.- An Experimental Evaluation of ZCS-DM for the Prediction of Urban Air Quality.- An investigation of the effectiveness of advanced modeling tools on the forecasting of daily PM10 values in the Greater Athens Area.- Traffic Related PM Predictor for Besiktas, Turkey.- Development and Evaluation of Data Mining Models for Air Quality Prediction in Athens, Greece.- Artificial neural networks based modelling of carbon monoxide: Effects of spatial parameters.- Using Preprocessing Techniques in Air Quality forecasting with Artificial Neural Networks.- Approach for Dynamic Problems in Clustering.- Stakeholder Interaction in Sustainability Reporting with Web 2.0.- Meta-modelling for cross-sectoral land use policy impact analysis: A model requirements analysis of the SIAT.- An interdisciplinary approach to resolving conflict in the water domain.- Conceptual design and implementation of a model for the integrated simulation of large-scale land-use systems.- Enterprise systems applications development plans to build and develop robust and environmentally sensitive green logistics systems management software.- An investigation of the parameters influencing the determination of the number of particulate matter sources and their contribution to the air quality of an indoor residential environment.- Evaluating long-term contamination in soils amended with sewage sludge.- Evaluation by simulation of the social acceptability of agricultural policies for water quality.- COPERT: A European Road Transport Emission Inventory Model.- A Survey of Knowledge Organization Systems in Environmental Sciences.- Semantic modeling of temporal information in a database for biotope inventories.- Environmental notions representation and description: Towards a redefinition of the relationships between information systems development and individual cognition.- Multi-agent-based System Technologies in Environmental Issues.- Specimen's behavior management: A masterpiece for Biodiversity Information System's representation.- MACE Multiagent Control for Energy Infrastructures.- Concluding talk.- Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems (CEMIS) for Sustainable Development.