AmIAire: A Citizen Science and Action Research Initiative for Air Quality Monitoring and Behavioral Change

AmIAire is a Citizen Science (CS) and action research project aimed at engaging elementary and secondary school students in monitoring ambient air quality and promoting sustainable behaviors. By providing low-cost, do-it-yourself (DIY) cardboard-and-vaseline sensors, the project enables students to capture airborne particulate matter (PM) and to know qualitatively the level of pollution in their environment. The project also enables users to use this data to do active research through different campaigns. Preliminary tests have shown a strong correlation between this simple technique and official PM monitoring stations, indicating that young citizen scientists can generate meaningful data to complement authoritative air quality networks. An image processing pipeline is established to infer particulate matter concentration from geolocated images of the DIY sensors and then shared on an open platform released by the project, thus establishing a publicly accessible, crowd-sourced air quality map. This paper outlines the project’s background, methodology, preliminary results, and broader impact on environmental policy, public health, and science education.