Large-scale environmental monitoring demands real-time, spatially-aware coordination across distributed networks. However, existing distributed computing models poorly capture spatial structure, hindering dynamic collaboration and fine-grained access control. We argue that space must be treated as a first-class concept in programming models for these systems based on bigraphs – a formalism that explicitly models spatial arrangements, data movement, and access policies, while supporting real-time reconfiguration and localised reasoning. This approach facilitates secure, composable, and dynamically verifiable coordination across geographically distributed nodes and organisations, paving the way for scalable, responsive environmental networks.