New Technique for Ranking of Air Pollution Monitoring Stations in the Urban Areas Based upon Spatial Representativity (Case Study: PM Monitoring Stations in Berlin)

Air pollution monitoring has recently become an issue of utmost importance in our society. Despite the fact that crowdsensing approaches could be an adequate solution for urban areas, they cannot be implemented in rural environments. Instead, deploying a fleet of UAVs could be considered an acceptable alternative. Embracing this approach, this paper proposes the use of UAVs equipped with off-the-shelf sensors to perform air pollution monitoring tasks. These UAVs are guided by our proposed Pollution-driven UAV Control (PdUC) algorithm, which is based on a chemotaxis metaheuristic and a local particle swarm optimization strategy. Together, they allow automatically performing the monitoring of a specified area using UAVs. Experimental results show that, when using PdUC, an implicit priority guides the construction of pollution maps by focusing on areas where the pollutants’ concentration is higher. This way, accurate maps can be constructed in a faster manner when compared to other strategies. The PdUC scheme is compared against various standard mobility models through simulation, showing that it achieves better performance. In particular, it is able to find the most polluted areas with more accuracy and provides a higher coverage within the time bounds defined by the UAV flight time.

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Applying Social Science to Bring Resident Stakeholders into Pollution Governance: A Rural Environmental Justice Public Health Case Study

Journal of Applied Social Science ◽

10.1177/19367244211001751 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 193672442110017

Author(s):

Sherrie M. Steiner ◽

Jordan M. Marshall ◽

Atefeh Mohammadpour ◽

Aaron W. Thompson

Keyword(s):

Air Pollution ◽

Social Science ◽

Pollution Monitoring ◽

Monitoring Method ◽

Air Pollution Monitoring ◽

Direct Exposure ◽

Cancer Clusters ◽

Governance Process ◽

The Impact

The purpose of this engaged public sociology study was to use social science to bring resident stakeholders into the process of governing pollution production in a rural community. The community has cancer clusters. Residents have concerns about direct exposure to pollution production in their neighborhood by a steel recycling plant that has been cited numerous times for environmental violations. The facility has been under voluntary remediation since 2009, but neighborhood residents were marginalized from the governance process. This case study details how social science was used to bring neighborhood residents’ concerns about direct exposure to toxic air pollution into remediation governance. A curricula-as-research model was developed to provide an engagement framework that guided the case study as it progressed through a series of six stages over five years. The principal investigator maintained this collaboration by integrating the project into courses, securing small grants, developing an affordable air pollution monitoring method, and convening multiple community meetings. The air monitoring results are analyzed and discussed. Finally, the impact of the case study on the company, the state environmental management agency, local government, the nonprofit partner, and residents’ sense of human agency is evaluated.

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