caa a22 4500 469029781 CHVBK 20180323132740.0 cr unu---uuuuu 170328e19920301xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/BF00407497 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/BF00407497 Roots E. Department of Environment, Canada aut Environmental information — A step to knowledge and understanding [Elektronische Daten] Opening comments [E. Roots] At a time when information and knowledge about the environment and the economy are increasing, problems of both environment and economy are growing more serious. It is the role and opportunity of a university institute concerned with research on environment and economy to convert information about the environment into knowledge, and to explore applications of that knowledge in areas of economic management and policy. The main barriers to production and dissemination of information that can contribute to effective environmental knowledge are those that affect the reliability, adequacy, accessibility, and understandability of environmental information. Such barriers may be systematic, biasing the gathering of information and selecting in advance who may benefit from it; they may be barriers of translation, with distortion of content or significance; barriers of sophistication, that determine both content and context; or, most difficult in the environmental field, barriers imposed by problems of scale and relationships of different scales. To be useful, information cannot be purely objective, but must have subjective value added. There is a staircase of ‘knowing', progressing from Observation and Measurement, to Data, to Information, to Knowledge, to Understanding, and finally to Wisdom, presenting increasing barriers of subjective value, interpretation, and integration at each step. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992 Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Kluwer Academic Publishers 20/2-3(1992-03-01), 87-94 0167-6369 20:2-3<87 1992 20 10661 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00407497 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00407497 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Roots E. Department of Environment, Canada aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Kluwer Academic Publishers 20/2-3(1992-03-01), 87-94 0167-6369 20:2-3<87 1992 20 10661 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer