Toward a Smart City: Monitoring Natural Resources State Using Environmental Indicators in Aqaba

Natural resources are fundamentally substances having an impact on the surrounding environments. This paper proposes a framework that utilizes performance Indicators for monitoring and measuring environmental state of such natural resources. These performance Indicators improve the quality of monitoring and reporting processes deployed for the natural resources to help decision makers, researchers and investors. The results of the performance indicators aim for formulating and implementing the policies for various sectors related to natural resources. To manifest these results, it is vital to adopt different technologies such as GPS, LBS, sensors, and mobile technologies. We suggest using the performance indicators for Aqaba city as a case study to show the performance result as a part of the smart city project proposed in our previous research to be implemented in the future. Introduction Recently, smart cities have witnessed popular attention by many researchers and business sectors for improving the provided quality services and enhancing the daily lifestyle by monitoring the activities and environments. In regard to, the smart city is a framework gathering appropriate information from variant resources and analyzing it to be used for decision-making in order to enhance the quality of life [1, 22]. Consequently, urban environmental issues must be integrated with spatial and structural features of smart cities in order to assess the expected environmental problems, challenges, the impact of developing the future city, and to monitor different resources. Hence, different technologies such as remote sensors, Geographic Information System (GIS) and mobile applications could be used to interact with multiple locations and gather cities’ data that is normally not an easy process especially in scattered locations [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Besides, the information from the social media could be integrated with physical devices such as sensors as input for controlling the flow of information and activities in the cities. Several research methods have been proposed to exhibit vital information about the environmental system, and to assess environmental problems, challenges, impact and use of living and non-living natural resources, these methods are called environmental performance indicators [8, 10]. Environmental indicators are powerful tools used for evaluating the state of an environment, by sending warning signals of environmental