Due to increasing practical needs, software support of environmental protection and research tasks is growing in importance and scope. Software systems help to monitor basic data, to maintain and process relevant environmental information, to analyze gathered information and to carry out decision processes, which often have to take into account complex alternatives with various side effects. Therefore software is an important tool for the environmental domain. When the first software systems in the environmental domain grew - 10 to 15 years ag- users and developers were not really aware of the complexity these systems are carrying with themselves: complexity with respect to entities, tasks and procedures. I guess nobody may have figured out at that time that the environmental domain would ask for solutions which information science would not be able to provide and - in several cases - can not provide until today. Therefore environmental informatics - as we call it today - is also an important domain of computer science itself, because practical solutions need to deal with very complex, interdisciplinary, distributed, integrated, sometimes badly defined, user-centered decision processes. I doubt somebody will state that we are already capable of building such integrated systems for end users for reasonable cost on a broad range. The development of the first scientific community for environmental informatics started around 1985 in Germany, becoming a technical committee and working group of the German Computer Society in 1987.

Zusammenfassung
Therefore environmental informatics - as we call it today - is also an important domain of computer science itself, because practical solutions need to deal with very complex, interdisciplinary, distributed, integrated, sometimes badly defined, user-centered decision processes.

Inhalt
One Invited Lectures.- 1 Environmental informatics towards a new discipline in applied computer science for environmental protection and reserach.- 2 Development of an environmental risk characterization methodology for the Philadelphia energy risk study.- 3 Requirements on integrated information systems from an ecological point of view.- 4 Software for hard decisions: scientific influence through interactive visualization.- Two Environmental Information Systems.- 5 An information framework for environmental research and management.- 6 Semantic enhancement of forest inventories by reengineering.- 7 Complex metadata management in Earth observation for environmental research.- 8 The ecological information-managing system of Bashkortostan Republic.- Three Modeling and Simulation.- 9 Environmental modeling and simulation applications and future requirements.- 10 A framework for distributed processing of air pollution dispersion models.- 11 Trinity: Model-based support for multi-actor environmental problem solving.- 12 EIS/GWM an integrated automated computer platform for regional multimedia environmental audits.- Four Environmental Management.- 13 Computer-supported environmental management why simulation methods are useful.- 14 Quality management as basis of environmental management systems for industrial plants.- Five Decision Support.- 15 A teamwork approach to decision support system development for watershed management problems.- 16 Partially ordered sets a computerized tool to compare environmental databases.- Six Distributed Environmental Information.- 17 Environmental information for public access.- 18 Global access to environmental information.- 19 SIRIUS Saarbruecken Information Retrieval and Interchange Utility Set.- Seven ArtificialIntelligence Applications.- 20 Biological monitoring: a comparison between Bayesian, neural and machine learning.- 21 On incorporating physical building parameters into neural net models of dynamic thermal behaviour.- 22 An intelligent prediction system for oil spill movement.- Eight Environmental Data Visualization.- 23 Data animator: visualization of two- and three-dimensional data as computer generated animations.- 24 Visualizing the spatial and temporary dynamics of ozone concentration data.- 25 Volume visualization of water quality data in Hamilton Harbour, Lake Ontario.- Index of contributors.- Keyword index.