Citizens in the Loop for Air Quality Monitoring in Thessaloniki, Greece

Air pollution may dictate the quality of the indoor as well as outdoor atmospheric environment. Due to its complicated nature, it is important for people to be able to identify how air quality (AQ) is interwoven to their everyday life, and how it is related to specific everyday activities. On this basis, and in the frame of the citizen science project URwatair (www.urwatair.gr) that was set-up in the Greater Thessaloniki Area (GTA), a number of AQ-related activities were designed. For this purpose, we employed a number of materials (questionnaires, low-cost AQ monitoring devices, on-line collaborative electronic workspaces) as well as methods (social media, hands-on workshops, gamified collaborative data processing), in order to engage citizens in the environmental monitoring and related knowledge extraction process. The aim of this study was to evaluate the methodology implemented in the URwatair project and to appraise results and conclusions extracted explicitly from citizens. The results indicate that citizens can identify main sources of air pollution in various situations and suggest everyday practices that can lead to lower exposure in high particulate matter concentrations.