IMPLICATIONS OF MOBILE-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN CONTAMINATED SOILS CHARACTERIZATION

Abstract

There is a wide range of Environmental Information Systems (EISs), both desktop and mobile platforms, with usability in industry and applied ecological studies. Of these, EISs for mobile devices have begun to be increasingly used in the current activity of those concerned with soil protection and agriculture management. According to the utilization impact of the mobile EISs in environmental protection, we introduce a new platform system, as an electronic field-observation agenda. It is configured and created with App Inventor software, for mobile devices under Android OS. The new application, that we created, came as an efficient approach in data and field-observation acquisition. The application was made using the tools offered by App Inventor 2.0 integrated development environment. It turned out to be extremely convenient to use, without the need for programming knowledge or special mobile devices, other than mobile phones owned. The SoilMonitor application, by its particular implication in environmental impact assessment (in contaminated soils management), requires complex interdisciplinary knowledge as well as profound technical information developed in the environment-informatics complex context. The field sheets completed with the help of the newly created application are of real use and can be the basis for creating an extremely complex environmental database. We try to demonstrate that the innovative technology associated with mobile apps, focusing on soil pollution monitoring and assessment can be an alternative to the classical monitoring approach, where the classic work-agenda is still not absent from the field.

Keywords

• app inventor
• environmental information systems
• mobile apps
• soil pollution