Environmental Assessment and the Application of Expert Systems: an Overview

Environmental concern has prompted greater use of assessment procedures to monitor the potential impacts development proposals on the environment; one such approach has been the application of expert systems. Expert systems are a branch of computer science known as artificial intelligence. Expert systems attempt to simulate the means by which a human expert tackles real-world problems using a set of rules and inferences programmed into a computer system. This paper reports on a number of expert systems which have been developed as environmental assessment tools, indicating the diverse approaches to the subject adopted by the different developers of such systems.