Technology-based management of environmental organizations using an Environmental Management Information System (EMIS): Design and development

• The proposed system can bridge the chasm between technology and public participation in environmental decision making in a more formal manner.
• The system promotes a holistic strategy for exploiting explicit and tacit knowledge to improve environmental management processes.
• The developed system facilitates environmental management to deal with more complex factors associated with issues of various natures.

The adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in environmental management has become a significant demand nowadays with the rapid growth of environmental information. This paper presents a prototype Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) that was developed to provide a systematic way of managing environmental data and human resources of an environmental organization. The system was designed using programming languages, a Database Management System (DBMS) and other technologies and programming tools and combines information from the relational database in order to achieve the principal goals of the environmental organization. The developed application can be used to store and elaborate information regarding: human resources data, environmental projects, observations, reports, data about the protected species, environmental measurements of pollutant factors or other kinds of analytical measurements and also the financial data of the organization. Furthermore, the system supports the visualization of spatial data structures by using geographic information systems (GIS) and web mapping technologies. This paper describes this prototype software application, its structure, its functions and how this system can be utilized to facilitate technology-based environmental management and decision-making process.