Project leader: Sarah Henderson
The study will make three key contributions to air quality management in BC. First, it will evaluate the small-scale air quality impacts of a woodstove exchange program using pre- and post-intervention mobile monitoring. Although ambient monitoring can capture general changes between periods, it cannot reflect changes in previously identified hotspot areas. This information will be valuable for other jurisdictions considering stove exchange programs and their likely air quality impacts. Second, it will map PM2.5 concentrations in one of many small BC communities where air quality is affected by commercial transportation, industrial emissions and residential woodsmoke. Comparison of maps for different times of the day, week and year will help to separate the temporal and spatial impacts of each source, thus allowing qualitative (and potentially quantitative) evaluation of changes to overall air quality resulting from changes related to any one source. Finally, the data generated will provide a rich foundation for other related research. For example, the data could be used in combination with land use regression methods to statistically model spatiotemporal PM2.5 exposure for epidemiologic studies in the communities at a later date.
Read the final report.
