Community-based environmental monitoring


We are working to develop tools and socio-technical approaches to make environmental monitoring and collective sense-making of environmental data at the community level more accessible and sustainable.

Between July and October 2021, we completed a pilot project in the Nine Mile Run Watershed, in collaboration with Upstream Pittsburgh. Participants deployed low cost environmental sensors at their homes and had the option to participate in a Slack-based discussion group to collectively make sense of the data.

Abhishek Viswanathan was recently awarded a Year of Data and Society grant, together with Amy Babay and Rosta Farzan, to engage community members in analyzing the data produced in the pilot project through a series of workshops focused on data analysis, data visualization, and data storytelling.