Humans are a product of their environment – the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, are all in one way or another our “environment”, which in turn, impacts our health. Air pollution has been a long-standing issue, from the time humans innovated cooking over fire stoves, to our present-day reliance on transportation, technology, and industry. Exposure to air pollution has been linked to premature deaths, respiratory diseases, such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and bronchitis, total body inflammation, and cancer. We are exposed to environmental contaminants everywhere and every day. For example, pesticides are used for farming practices to increase crop yield. With the advancements in commercial farming, any number of highly toxic, highly volatile pesticides are ubiquitously used within the same area. Many communities living near major sources of air pollution, such as freeways, industrial sites, and agricultural areas, have been demonstrated to be disproportionately burdened by these environmental contaminants. While environmental conditions have improved drastically since the 1970s, there is high variability of what communities are experiencing at the local level. Recently, there has been a rise in environmental concerns locally; communities are concerned that current environmental monitoring and assessment methods are flawed in two ways. First, these methods are focused on regional impacts not capturing local environmental conditions within smaller communities. Since the 1970s, environmental agencies have evaluated environmental contaminant levels using monitoring and modeling techniques that demonstrate how pollutant concentrations are impacting a region. Many of these methods were developed to demonstrate compliance with state and federal standards. For example, monitoring equipment is strategically placed to understand the impacts of air quality on a region, rather than a local community, and air dispersion modeling has typically been reserved for large industrial operations that are likely to exceed regional air quality standards. Second, these methods do not consider exposure to multiple environmental contaminants which, coupled with social burdens such as low income and limited access to resources, make communities more susceptible to health impacts, ultimately diminishing their quality of life. Single pollutant evaluations are not representative of real-world exposure scenarios.
These concerns highlight a needed call to action to better understand and evaluate environmental pollutants. New or repurposed methods and tools would ultimately provide regulators data at a more granular scale to make decisions in the interest of specific communities, rather than over an entire region. A better understanding of pollution variation in a community would also help regulators know where to focus intervention efforts. My dissertation explores tools and methods with the goal to: (1) recommend how to use new low-cost sensor monitoring technology to successfully understand localized air quality impacts, (2) present a case study using localized air pollution data to better quantify community exposures to air pollution, and (3) explore how air dispersion modeling can be used to evaluate exposure to multiple pesticides at the local level. Results from this dissertation developed new methods for setting up low-cost air quality sensor networks, emphasize variable air pollution concentrations within communities, and demonstrated the feasibility of repurposing modeling tools to evaluate pesticide use. This research is critical to reinforcing the importance of implementing new methods and technologies to understand localized impacts and provide data to regulatory bodies who are responsible for emission control, land use decision making, and public health intervention.
