Amazon fires—whether uncontrolled wildfires or intentional burns—produce smoke waves that can blanket the region with unhealthy air for months at a time.These smoke plumes are visible from space and affect the health and wellbeing of millions of Amazonians, yet there is little ground-based data on air quality outside major cities. In this talk, Marcia Macedo will share recent experiences building a ground-based network of low-cost sensors to monitor particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) at “nose level” over large swaths of the Amazon.
This sensor network, which began as a local project in the state of Acre, Brazil, has grown into a regional grassroots movement that includes Indigenous communities and associations, local universities, civil society partners, and municipal governments. Together, they have deployed hundreds of commercially available low-cost sensors to help fill the large gaps in air quality data for rural areas. This talk will share the story of how this coalition came to be – outlining the technical challenges of maintaining a reliable monitoring network in humid, infrastructure-limited environments, while highlighting emerging opportunities to leverage the data collected to support public health policies and improve fire management.
Event Speaker
Marcia Macedo, Assistant Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University.
