Air Quality Avengers: Fighting Air Pollution with Biodiversity

As the world continues to become more industrialized, the quality of the air we breathe continues to decrease, especially in cities. Our experiment will help us examine the correlation between air quality and biodiversity. We used quadrats to determine where to sample for the different amount of plant species in the park. And later used the Shannon index which is a statistical formula that helps calculate the amount of biodiversity in a given area and interprets it as a whole or decimal number, the higher the number is the more biodiverse the space is, which is how we classified the level of biodiversity. In order to measure the PM 2.5 in the air we used AirBeams that measure particulate matter, temperature, and humidity for a span of 10 minutes in a given location. We found that Sakura Park out of the three parks we visited (Sheltering Arms Playground, and Brotherhood Sister Sol Community Garden) was the second most biodiverse and had the least amount of PM 2.5 measured throughout the span of the 3 day sample timeframe