Binding Environmental Sciences and Artificial Intelligence in Environmental Modelling & Software

We are pleased to introduce a selection of the papers presented at the ECAI’98 Workshop on Binding Environmental Sciences and Artificial Intelligence (BESAI) (Cortés & Sànchez-Marrè, 1998) [3]. The BESAI workshop has its roots in the IJCAI’95 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and the Environment (Mason, 1995) that is, to our best knowledge, the only initiative of its kind in the framework of a big Artificial Intelligence Conference. That IJCAI workshop was organised at that time by some members of the Artificial Intelligence Research In Environmental Sciences group (AIRIES) [1] and they are still running a series of workshops. This academic interest (see [1], [3], and [7]) corresponds to growing environmental concern, industries (e.g. the ISO14001, the European standard EMAS, [2], etc) and in politics (e.g. Kyoto summit or Rio do Janeiro declaration). The survival of the human species and our quality of life depends upon our ability to manage and sustain the earth’s natural resources. Therefore new tools for solving old problems in a new and effective way are more and more welcome. As pointed out by several authors, the environment is a complex and dynamic system: different aspects can lead to the same impact (e.g. the emission of global warming gases), while other aspects might combine synergistically to create an impact which is much greater than that which would be predicted using a reductionist approach (e.g. the emission of solvents and nitrogen oxides that can react in the atmosphere to produce smog). Thus, further analysis is required to assess the