Seeing the forest through the trees: A review of integrated environmental modelling tools

Today’s interconnected socio-economic and environmental challenges require the combination and reuse of existing integrated modelling solutions. This paper contributes to this overall research area, by reviewing a wide range of currently available frameworks, systems and emerging technologies for integrated modelling in the environmental sciences. Based on a systematic review of the literature, we group related studies and papers into viewpoints and elaborate on shared and diverging characteristics. Our analysis shows that component-based modelling frameworks and scientific workflow systems have been traditionally used for solving technical integration challenges, but ultimately, the appropriate framework or system strongly depends on the particular environmental phenomenon under investigation. The study also shows that – in general – individual integrated modelling solutions do not benefit from components and models that are provided by others. It is this island (or silo) situation, which results in low levels of model reuse for multi-disciplinary settings. This seems mainly due to the fact that the field as such is highly complex and diverse. A unique integrated modelling solution, which is capable of dealing with any environmental scenario, seems to be unaffordable because of the great variety of data formats, models, environmental phenomena, stakeholder networks, user perspectives and social aspects. Nevertheless, we conclude that the combination of modelling tools, which address complementary viewpoints – such as service-based combined with scientific workflow systems, or resource-modelling on top of virtual research environments – could lead to sustainable information systems, which would advance model sharing, reuse and integration. Next steps for improving this form of multi-disciplinary interoperability are sketched.