Fondazione GRINS
Growing Resilient,
Inclusive and Sustainable
Galleria Ugo Bassi 1, 40121, Bologna, IT
C.F/P.IVA 91451720378
Finanziato dal Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR), Missione 4 (Infrastruttura e ricerca), Componente 2 (Dalla Ricerca all’Impresa), Investimento 1.3 (Partnership Estese), Tematica 9 (Sostenibilità economica e finanziaria di sistemi e territori).



Open Access
GRINS THEMATIC AREAS
RESOURCES
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in air pollutants and their effects on human health. More generally, it has become evident how human, animal and environmental health are deeply interconnected within a One Health framework. Ground level air monitoring stations are sparse and thus have limited coverage due to high costs. Satellite and reanalysis data represent an alternative with high spatio-temporal resolution. The idea of this work is to build an Artificial Intelligence model for the estimation of surface-level daily concentrations of air pollutants over the entire Italian territory using satellite, climate reanalysis, geographical and social data. As ground truth we use data from the monitoring stations of the Regional Environmental Protection Agency (ARPA) covering the period 2019–2022 at municipal level. The analysis compares different models and applies an Explainable Artificial Intelligence approach to evaluate the role of individual features in the model. The best model reaches an average 𝑅2 of 0.84 ± 0.01 and MAE of 5.00 ± 0.01 μ g/m3 across all pollutants which compare well with the body of literature. The XAI analysis highlights the pivotal role of satellite and climate reanalysis data. Our work can facilitate One Health surveys and help researchers and policy makers.
AKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study was funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU, in the framework of the GRINS - Growing Resilient, INclusive and Sustainable project (GRINS PE00000018). The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, nor can the European Union be held responsible for them.
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