Environmental Decision-Making - New Ecoinformatics Tools in Environmental Science: Applications and Decision-making - page 248

3.7 Disaster Decision-Making

It is evident that methods of local diagnostics of the environment do not permit a
complex assessment of the state of a natural object or process, especially if this
element of the environment covers a vast area. In the problems of geoinformation
monitoring, situations occur when it is necessary to make a decision in real time,
with limited capabilities of the applied means of data collection and processing. In
this connection, the scheme of Fig. 3.16 proposes a monitoring procedure that
formalizes the decision making on the operative diagnose of the studied environ-
mental subsystem. According to this scheme, the regular control of the environ-
mental elements is realized with the use of technical measuring means and
algorithms for observational data processing (Kondratyev and Krapivin 2005a).
With the development of the civilization, the problem of the future environment
changes forecasting and bound with them changes of the living conditions for people
becomes all more current importance. The origin and spread of dangerous natural
phenomena do not only ruin the lifes of living beings, but they also cause serious
economic damage (Kondratyev and Krapivin 2005; Milne 2004; Gardner 2002).
Such phenomena are known as natural catastrophes. Historically, natural anomalies
on different spatio-temporal scales have played an important role in the evolution of
nature, causing and actuating the mechanisms of natural systems regulation. Wild-

fires can serve a special example of the similar sort of anomalies (Kondratyev et al.

Fig. 3.16 Block-scheme of the monitoring system for the detection and identification of the
natural subsystem in the environment in real time regime, with combined use of measuring devices
and data processing algorithms