New Opportunities in Crowd-Sourced Monitoring and Non-government Data Mining for Developing Urban Air Quality Models in the US
Ambient air pollution is among the top 10 health risk factors in the US. With increasing concerns about adverse health effects of ambient air pollution among stakeholders including environmental scientists, health professionals, urban planners and community residents, improving air quality is a crucial goal for developing healthy communities. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) aims to reduce air pollution by regulating emissions and continuously monitoring air pollution levels. Local communities also benefit from crowd-sourced monitoring to measure air pollution, particularly with the help of rapidly developed low-cost sampling technologies. The shift from relying only on government-based regulatory monitoring to crowd-sourced effort has provided new opportunities for air quality data. In addition, the fast-growing data sciences (e.g., data mining) allow for leveraging open data from different sources to improve air pollution exposure assessment. My dissertation investigates how new data sources of air quality (e.g., community-based monitoring, low-cost sensor platform) and model predictor variables (e.g., non-government open data) based on emerging modeling approaches (e.g., machine learning [ML]) could be used to improve air quality models (i.e., land use regression [LUR]) at local, regional, and national levels for refined exposure assessment. LUR models are commonly used for predicting air pollution concentrations at locations without monitoring data based on neighboring land use and geographic variables. I explore the use of crowd-sourced low-cost monitoring data, new/open dataset from government and non-government sponsored platforms, and emerging modeling techniques to develop LUR models in the US. I focus on testing whether: (1) air quality data from community-based monitoring is feasible for developing LUR models, (2) air quality data from non-government crowd-sourced low-cost sensor platforms could supplement regulatory monitors for LUR development, and (3) new/open data extracted from ...