JGI Seed Corn Funding Project Blog 2023/24: James Matthews
A reduction in urban air quality is known to be a detrimental to health, affecting many conditions including cardiorespiratory health. Sources of poor air quality in urban areas include industry, traffic and domestic wood burning. Air quality can be tracked by many government, university and citizen held pollution sensors. Bristol has implemented a clean air zone, but non-traffic related sources, such as domestic wood burning, are not affected.
The project came about through the initiative of Christina Biggs who approached academics in the school of Engineering Mathematics and Technology (Nikolai Bode) and the School of Chemistry (James Matthews and Anwar Khan) with a vision for an easy to use data dashboard that could empower citizens by drawing data from citizen science, university and council air quality and traffic sensors in order to better understand the causes of poor air quality in their area. The aims were to (1) work with community groups to inform the dashboard design (2) create an online dashboard bringing together air quality and traffic data (3) use council air quality sensors to enable comparison with citizen science sensors for validation and (4) to use this to identify likely sources of poor air quality.
An online dashboard was created using R with Shiny and Leaflet, collecting data using API code, and tested offline. The latest version of the dashboard has been named the Bristol Air Quality and Traffic (AQT) dashboard. The dashboard allows PM2.5 data and traffic numbers to be investigated in specific places and plotted as a time series. We are able to compare citizen sensor data to council and government data, and we can compare to known safety limits.
The dashboard collates traffic data from several sources including Telraam traffic report and Vivacity traffic data which provide information on car numbers from local sensors; and PM2.5 data from different sources including Defra air quality stations and SensorCommunity (previously named as Luftdaten) citizen air quality stations. Clicking onto a data point provides the previous 24 hour time series of measurements. For example, in the screenshots below, one Telraam sensor shows a clear PM2.5 peak during the morning rush hour of 26th June 2024 (a) which is likely related to traffic, while the second shows a higher PM2.5 peak in the evening (b) which could be related to domestic field burning, such as an outdoor barbecue. A nearby traffic sensor shows that the morning peak and smaller afternoon peak do agree with traffic numbers (c), but the evening peak might be unrelated. Data can be selected from historic data sets and is available to download for future interrogation.
It is a hope that these snapshots might provide an intuitive way for communities to understand the air quality in their location. Throughout the project, the project team held regular meetings with Stuart Phelps from Baggator, a community group based in Easton, Bristol, so that community needs were put to the forefront of the dashboard design.
We are currently planning a demonstration event with local stakeholders to allow them to interrogate the data and provide feedback that can be used to add explanatory text to the dashboard and enable easy and intuitive analysis of the data. We will then engage with academic communities to consider how to use the data on the dashboard to answer deeper scientific questions.
Contact details and links
Details of the dashboard can be found at the link below, and further questions can be sent to James Matthews at j.c.matthews@bristol.ac.uk
https://github.com/christinabiggs/Bristol-AQT-Dashboard/tree/main