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An intercollegiate study, in partnership with George Mason University's Facilities, analyzes the effects of campus events and weather on local air and water quality.
Major events at George Mason University, like graduation ceremonies, basketball games, and Mason Day are high-water events in student life. But how do they affect the campus ecosystem?
For the past year, with support from the Institute for a Sustainable Earth (ISE), groups of undergraduate and graduate engineering students have worked with university Facilities to sample air and water quality measurements at eight spots across campus. They are studying how human-centered activities like special events and campus construction projects, along with natural events like heavy rainstorms, affect the urban campus environment.
“Fairfax is a very active campus in terms of construction,” said Maryam Zavareh, an expert in environmental engineering who earned her PhD from George Mason in 2021. “They’re always building something or something is always going on for students.”
Weather is also a factor, she pointed out, and so are projects like rain gardens (also called best management practices or BMPs). “Rain can affect a stream’s turbidity and its dissolved oxygen in a negative way, while BMPs can help quality.”
As part of her PhD program, Zavareh started taking measurements around Mason Pond and campus streams. She wanted to use machine learning to predict water quality patterns in conjunction with the Maggioni Research Group, a lab run on campus by water resources engineering expert Viviana Maggioni, an associate professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering, and air quality expert Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor in the department. With this ISE grant, Maggioni called Zavareh back to run the project as a consultant.
Starting in May 2024, a new group of students each semester have learned to gather data in the field, work with the instruments, and calibrate them for accurate readings.
“One of the advantages of this project is that students get to go into the field and take measurements,” said Dinesh Neupane, a PhD candidate in civil and environmental engineering and student leader for the project. “That was lacking in my previous programs—students stayed in the labs.”
Neupane is excited for the opportunity to measure air quality—something that hasn’t been done yet on campus—in addition to water. “We want to calibrate the ground data we measure with satellite imagery to see if we can get the imaging to accurately take the readings for us,” he said.
So far, Neupane said that campus events do not have a major effect on water quality. “We think big gatherings will have an effect on air quality, but we don’t have that data yet. We’re still in the process of setting those instruments up.”
This year’s work by Zavareh, Neupane, and their student teams lays the groundwork for future students to analyze their data and carry the research forward. They are proving that ISE’s Mason as a Living Lab program offers great insights.