ABSTRACT
Half of the world's population lives in cities, where usually there are few little green space and there are also high levels of air pollution. Moreover, the traditional urbanization of cities contributes to climate change, promotes the loss of global biodiversity and induces serious health problems for citizens. Both climate change and the loss of biodiversity affect negatively to the ecosystems and therefore human health, as they are responsible for providing clean air, food, fresh water, medicines, renewable resources. . . This deterioration increases significantly the risk of human-borne infectious diseases such as coronavirus or HIV. The ability we have to re-naturalize anthropogenic spaces and learn to generate spaces for coexistence will be key for the future of our society. The research presented in this paper aims to do a step forward to achieve that ability by working in three schools of the city of Barcelona and their surroundings. Among other actions, in this project, a diagnosis of neighborhood has been carried out. The diagnosis includes the identification and quantification of relevant indicators regarding neighborhood's biodiversity and also the quality of daily life and the analysis of pollutants (NO2 and PM10) near the schools during the 2021-2022 school year. All these information has been merged in a single geographic data base and relevant hotspots where to act have been identified. The information has been shared with city council and citizens. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.
ABSTRACT
World cities are currently facing one of the major crisis of the last century. Some preliminary studies on COVID-19 pandemia have shown that air pollutants may have a strong impact on virus effects. Improved gas sensors and wireless communication systems open the door to the design of new air monitoring systems based on citizen science to better monitor and communicate the air quality levels. In this paper, we present the Crowdsourced Air Quality Monitoring (C-AQM) system, which relies on Air Quality Monitoring reference stations and a cluster of new low-cost and low-energy sensor nodes, in order to improve the resolution of air quality maps. The data collected by the C-AQM system is stored in a time series database and is available both to city council managers for decision making and to citizens for informative purposes. In this paper, we present the main bases of the C-AQM system as well as the measurements validation campaign carried out. © Authors 2020.