While environmental issues keep gaining increasing atten-
tion from the public opinion and policy makers, several ex-
periments demonstrated the feasibility of wireless sensor net-
works to be used in a large variety of environmental mon-
itoring applications. Focusing on the assessment of envi-
ronmental noise pollution in urban areas, we provide qual-
itative considerations and preliminary experimental results
that motivate and encourage the use of wireless sensor net-
works in this context.