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Sustainable Low–Cost Air Pollution Monitors and Air Quality

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Air, Climate Change and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 November 2024 | Viewed by 351

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable development is the core value of human society in creating a better future for living. The UN set the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for its country members to practice and collaborate on globally. Among others, air quality improvement has been the major climate action in facilitating an equilibrium between industrial development and human health. To augment the coverage of air quality monitoring regions, low-cost and low-power sensors have been deployed at a large scale to offer a substantial analysis of air quality. The huge number of participating organizations and citizens further promote the research with citizen science to improve air quality. For the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has made great progress in diverse fields. The applications of AI, especially deep learning, seep into every piece of air quality to reach a sustainable future. We anticipate a great opportunity to explore promising computational approaches for low-cost sensors and air quality analysis.

The purpose of the Special Issue is to call attention to the marriage between “computational approaches” and “low-cost sensors and air quality” and to boost the synergy between the two streams. The publication of our Special Issue will position itself at the sustainability frontier for promoting low-cost sensors and air quality.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Low–cost air pollution monitors;
  • Air quality forecast;
  • Air quality spatiotemporal analysis;
  • Sustainability and air quality IoT;
  • Sustainability and human health;
  • Big data mining for air quality;
  • Machine learning and artificial intelligence for air quality analysis;
  • Heuristic and metaheuristic for air quality analysis;
  • Operation and maintenance for air quality IoT.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Pengyeng Yin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • low-cost air monitoring sensors
  • air quality
  • IoT
  • artificial intelligence
  • computational approaches
  • spatiotemporal analysis
  • air quality forecast

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

22 pages, 5094 KiB  
Article
Mining Associations between Air Quality and Natural and Anthropogenic Factors
by Peng-Yeng Yin
Sustainability 2024, 16(11), 4614; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16114614 - 29 May 2024
Viewed by 182
Abstract
The urbanization and industrialization of human society boost the socioeconomic growth but yet inevitably result in unprecedented damages to environment and organisms. One of the threats is the air pollution produced from anthropogenic activities. Moreover, the pollution concentrates longer in certain meteorological phenomena [...] Read more.
The urbanization and industrialization of human society boost the socioeconomic growth but yet inevitably result in unprecedented damages to environment and organisms. One of the threats is the air pollution produced from anthropogenic activities. Moreover, the pollution concentrates longer in certain meteorological phenomena and exacerbates the impact on nature species and human health. This paper presents an association mining approach to identify the influential factors which result in a high volume of air pollution concentration, in particular, the particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.5 μm (PM2.5). Since the literature showed that the identified factors are location and spatial-scale dependent, we chose a basin geography, Puli township, Taiwan, and inferred the association relationships with two different-scaled monitoring stations. The government-built supersite at Puli estimates the PM2.5 concentration for the entire township of the area around 150 km2, while the participatory microsites monitor air quality in a smaller region of a hundred thousand square meters. Our research was conducted with relevant data during 2017–2019. The mining result has unique findings as compared to the literature. The relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed and direction, which were identified as major factors in many previous studies, have less impact on air quality of our studied field than temperature and atmospheric pressure. The remarkable distinction is mainly attributed to the special weather patterns of basin geography. We investigated the impact of all national festivals and identified the most significant ones. The probability of observing PM2.5 concentrations greater than 35 μg/m3 in the activity hours of New Year’s Eve is 50% which is significantly greater than 11.74%, the probability of observing the same concentration range over all days in the investigated years, while the Tomb Sweeping Day (TSD) has a varying impact on air quality depending on the order of the TSD date within the long holiday. The increase of PM2.5 concentration is remarkably more significant if the TSD is the last day in the long holiday than if it is the middle day. This finding can be taken into consideration when the government agent makes schedules for national festivals. Finally, it was learned in our study that different landmarks and land uses have various significant impacts on micro-scale air quality. The microsites monitor high PM2.5 concentrations at particular landmarks with a greater confidence than the mean confidence over all microsites. These pollution-associated landmarks with the confidence ranked from highest to lowest are night markets, crossroads, paper mills, temples, and highway exits. It is worth noting that the PM2.5 increase contributed by temples is negligible, which may be attributed to the citizen action for promoting reduction in joss paper and incense stick burning. The land uses have diverse impacts on air quality. Anthropogenic activities contribute higher PM2.5 concentrations in business districts and residential areas. The PM2.5 concentration monitored at high lands and agricultural lands is lower than the overall background due to fewer mass gathering and combustion activities in these land uses. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Low–Cost Air Pollution Monitors and Air Quality)
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