This paper presents the foundations for building mobile environmental information systems (MEISs) requiring an interdisciplinary approach. MEISs require expertise from the disciplines of environmental biology, geography, and mobile technology. MEISs show great promise for the acquisition of environmental information using different mobile devices. Automatic mobile acquisition enables the forwarding of the information to central databases for storage, further processing, and transmission to the mobile devices in a form that is useful to the users. Furthermore, these systems have the potential to be used both in the protection of nature, as well as in recreational use in a way that takes the constraints of nature into account. In this paper we describe the preliminary results of the MINNE project and the prototypes currently under research in the project.