China no longer short of environmental monitoring data: expert

FUZHOU -- China is no longer suffering from a shortage of environmental monitoring data, according to a senior researcher attending the ongoing Digital China Summit.

"The era of big data for ecological environment monitoring has come," said Wang Qiao, an academician from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, at the third Digital China Summit, which opened on Monday in Fuzhou, capital city of Fujian Province in east China.

"The analysis of massive data will bring valuable products and services," he said.

China currently has more than 5,000 automatic monitoring stations for urban air quality, about 11,000 surface water monitoring sections, some 80,000 soil monitoring points, more than 1,500 monitoring points for radiation, along with four environmental monitoring satellites in orbit, according to Wang.

He said that the accumulated amount of ground environmental monitoring data exceeds 300 terabytes (TB), while the monitoring data accumulated from satellite remote sensing is over 3 petabytes (PB).

"The continuous, full environmental monitoring data based on the 'time-space' of big data, such as the Internet of Things, will significantly improve the limitation that a small amount of environmental monitoring data cannot reflect the real quality of the ecological environment," said the academician.

The digital summit was jointly organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the provincial government of Fujian.

Scheduled to run from Monday to Wednesday, the summit includes an online platform to demonstrate the latest achievements in the development of digital China.