Environment

Air pollution imposes significant environmental and health risks worldwide and is expected to deteriorate in the coming decade as cities expand. Measuring population exposure to air pollution is crucial to quantifying risks to public health. In this work, we introduce a big data analytics framework to model residents' stay and commuters' travel exposure to outdoor PM2.5 and evaluate their environmental justice, with Beijing as an example. Using mobile phone and census data, we first infer travel demand of the population to derive residents' stay activities in each analysis zone, and then...

Monitoring urban air quality with high spatiotemporal resolution continues to pose significant challenges. We investigate the use of taxi fleets as mobile sensing platforms, analyzing over 100 million PM2.5 readings from more than 3,000 vehicles across six major U.S. cities during one year. Our findings show that taxis provide fine-grained, street-level air quality insights while ensuring city-wide coverage. We further explore urban air quality modeling using traffic congestion, built environment, and human mobility data to predict pollution variability. Our results highlight geography-...

Different interpretations of the fire regime concept have limited the capacity to allocate specific fire regimes worldwide. To solve this limitation, in this study, we present a framework to frame contemporary fire regimes spatially on a global scale. We process historical wildfire records between 2000 and 2018 across the six continents. We uncover 15 global pyromes with clear differences in fire-related metrics, such as frequency and size. The pyromes were further divided into 62 regimes based on spatial aggregation patterns. This spatial framing of contemporary fire regimes allows for an...

Public electric vehicle (EV) chargers are unevenly distributed in California with respect to income, race and education-levels. This creates inequitable access to electric mobility especially for low-income communities of color, which. are less likely to have access to home charging stations. These vulnerable communities are also more likely to be located in areas with poor air quality and would therefore benefit from EV adoption. Currently programs exist in California that fund incentives for public EV chargers in “Disadvantaged Communities” but the process for identifying these...