Over the past decade, new and emerging technologies in air pollution instrumentation have made it possible to involve students and citizen scientists in air pollution monitoring. Similarly, advances in data communication and transmission have made it increasingly easy to share and display data. The AQTreks program has used these advances to get air pollution monitors into the hands of thousands of students around the world and to automate data sharing. These educational projects began in 2009 with the GO3 Project, a stationary ground level ozone monitoring project. In the GO3 Project, students and teachers at more than 100 schools from around the world installed ozone and weather monitoring stations at their schools with automatic uploading of their data, resulting in more than 12 million ozone measurements. Over the years, new technologies became available for students to expand their measurements from stationary to mobile platforms. Since 2016, the AQTreks educational program has been developed concurrently with the Personal Air Monitor (PAM), a mobile sensor suite paired with a smartphone app. Complimenting the technology are online curricula and resources for students and citizens to learn about air pollution and climate change. In these projects, a focus on data quality and the careful selection of monitoring technologies have resulted in scientific use of the student-collected data. Since 2010 we have been working with Mansel Nelson to get this technology into the hands of the students he works with at the K-12 and college levels. We also also provided PAMs for the TAMS sensor training in late 2019. In the coming month I will work on partnering with a tribal member who has used the PAM and AQTreks to talk about their experience with the program and how they see it being used to benefit tribal monitoring and education objectives.
