Globally, the move towards services based on so-called ‘big data’ is, and will increasingly, profoundly affect the way in which every aspect of society functions. The the environmental sector will be a major contributor to these changes, based on multi-modal information obtained from numerous sources. Critical to the creation of new services and related industries that will emerge from these trends will be access to high quality data that is essential for informed and accurate decision-making across agriculture and land use, optimised food production, management of water bodies, prediction of climatic events (e.g. flooding, droughts) and organisation of their subsequent management. Two major sources of environmental information will be via remote sensing using satellite and flyovers (including drones), and in-situ distributed monitoring using sensor networks. In this paper, I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of remote and in-situ sensing, and show how many of the weaknesses of each can be overcome by pooling the information from both sources, as this will enable the creation of a much more complete and robust picture of environmental status over time. Issues related to long-term in-situ chemical and biosensing will be discussed, along with the potential use of surrogate measurements to indicate the status of local chemistry/biology.