Become a community scientist

Tomorrow Foundation’s Traffic Counting and Air Quality Monitoring Community Science Project

The Tomorrow Foundation, an Edmonton Environmental Charity, has been busy working with University of Alberta (UofA) students from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. As part of their Air Quality Monitoring Community Science Project with the Alberta Capital Airshed, they hope to collect data on traffic volumes to understand the correlation between emissions from vehicles and air quality in different Edmonton neighbourhoods. A prototype low-cost traffic counter was developed by a volunteer a couple of years ago, however they engaged some expert assistance to make it more reliable, easily deployable, and give them the help needed to get a finished product.

In January of this year, two groups of students began working on the brief to design a cost-effective, easily deployable, and easily maintainable system to track, store, and display local traffic data. Both groups successfully developed prototypes that use machine learning algorithms to identify and count different types of vehicles (cars, trucks, buses) in real time. Additionally, they created user interfaces to display the data simply and clearly. Even better, they were able to demonstrate significant cost savings from the original prototype. On Thursday April 13, 2023, the finished prototypes were presented at an event at the UofA.

The Tomorrow Foundation is grateful to the UofA’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, particularly the students, and Professor Knudsen, for giving them the opportunity to work with these talented students. Deploying this traffic counter at community scientist locations, along with a low-cost air quality monitor, is going to help communities further understand the relationship between vehicle emissions, trees, and air quality. The Tomorrow Foundation can’t wait to get them out there!

If you are interested in staying updated or getting involved, the Tomorrow Foundation would love to hear from you! A workshop open to community scientists of all ages and abilities to build their own traffic counter is planned for late fall. The traffic counters will be installed in locations where traffic and air quality is of interest - this could be community halls, schools, or even private condos/houses.

For more information, please email sandra@tomorrowfoundation.ca or check out the Tomorrow Foundation website.

This post was submitted by the Tomorrow Foundation, an Edmonton organization. If you live in Edmonton and have a climate change story to tell, let us know! Your story could be shared here too.