In lab this week, we will perform the following:
We are working toward the climate/air quality group poster described here. Note that you can find your group for this lab at the Sakai Lessons Week 2 sub-page.
Before we revisit the community guidelines document, please read this article in Small Pond Science (content warning: references sexual assault) and this Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America article (please pay special attention to Table 1).
Here are some guiding questions to consider. There are additional questions that we can and should consider as a group! Please share them, and if you are uncomfortable sharing them directly, you are welcome to anonymously pose the question in the Google doc.
For this laboratory project, you will have several decisions to make as a community:
This resource from the Royal Geographical Society may provide additional insight into experimental design elements such as transects.
You may be wondering - what is a transect? It is a common method of field sampling. For transect sampling, one typically takes data at specific, equally-spaced locations along a gradient or across (micro)habitats. For one example of transect sampling air pollution, please see this Public Lab write up and/or this Inside Ecology write up.
This is also a form of systematic sampling, as you would be taking measurements at locations based on a fixed pattern. For more background on sampling procedures and guidance on one way to think through sampling design, please visit this Environmental Chemical Analysis site. Note that not all of the examples there are relevant (e.g. biodiversity sampling, soil sampling), but the general principles in Sections 2.1, 2.2 (our sample is more akin to a “grab sample”), and 2.4 are pertinent.
How might you replicate data collection to try and account for uncertainty in individual estimates? Generally there are two broad ways to achieve this: spatial replication and temporal replication. In your small groups, please discuss the salient variables that could affect the class’ question (e.g. distance to a road or a construction site for pollutants, tree cover for a heat island effect, and time of day).
Note that the PL Air units report AQI, PM 2.5, PM 10, and O3 data. You can toggle back to the previous week’s Air Quality page to see Myriad Sensors’ (PL Air company) description of how these values are estimated. However, if, for instance, you are interested in the raw values of PM 2.5 that are reported, you may wonder how these values are converted to and from AQI scores. You can navigate to this AirNow calculator to see how your data maps to AQI. If you would like to see the interpretation of AQI values, please check out this AirNow explainer site. Note - researchers are still developing ways to take the much more instantaneous data we observe on the PL Air and other sensors to “instant exposure” AQI scales. For now though we can use the 24-hour averages for PM and submit the observed data to see that mapping play out (between \(\mu g/m^3\) to AQI scores).
1T5MU5
Student
using this class code and your FIRST NAME, SURNAME FIRST INITIAL. (e.g. Cecil S. for Cecil Sagehen) as it is displayed in the Pomona Portal (if you would like that updated, please let me know and I can do that).csv
(comma-separated values spreadsheet file) to: