With Steve Jobs' announcement that the iPhone3Gwill have geolocation built-in, plenty of people are excited about finding good restaurants near them or worried about the privacy implications of that

But the new capability could be adapted by a different, unexpected crowd: citizen scientists taking the real-time environmental pulse of cities and suburb.

One requirement of this data-gathering effort would be maintaining the integrity of the data input. GPS eliminates the need to accurately report location data, which is a major area of human error. With Apple putting devices with these capabilities into the hands of more and more consumers, scientists could discover a huge untapped data-gathering resource if they can churn out cheap sensors that can communicate with the iPhone.

That would be the next step in the new trend of turning real built and natural environments into data that can be visualized in virtual environments, i.e., of marrying geographic and virtual space. When we asked futurist Jamais Cascio what the Internet will look like in 2020, he responded:

It will be indistinguishable from the physical world.... At a glance, I can see environmental information.

Oh, it's raining? How much has it rained? What's the pollen count?

What's the forecast? All of these bits and pieces of how we appreciate the world around us will be given greater specificity and made graspable.

To create that digital instantiation of the real world, you need data about it. While some programs like the Center for Embedded Network Sensing at UCLA or MIT's Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling are attempting to put top-down pervasive sensor networks into some regions (like Singapore), citizen scientists could present a more distributed, alternative way of gathering environmental data.

In fact, Nokia has already unveiled a concept design for an EcoSensor phone that would allow users to see data about the air that they are breathing or the water they are drinking.

Maybe a dedicated environmental device could find a niche market, but it seems to us that a $200 iPhone with cheap sensor add-ons could be the right combination to drive large-scale adoption of citizen science applications like crowdsourced environmental sensing.

See Also:

Networking Things: How the Internet Is Redefining Environmentalism

WWDC: Location-Aware iPhone Tools Set to Flood the Web

MIT Launches Pervasive Environmental Sensor Program

SXSW 2008: "10 Ways to Greenify Your Digital Life"

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.