The official web resource of the Ministry of the Environment and their mobile application EcoZagroza now include data from the all-Ukrainian public monitoring network. Almost 200 EcoCity stations, despite the hostilities, provide daily monitoring of air quality and assess the concentration of various contaminants and radiation levels 24/7 in various regions, both peaceful and occupied ones.
The memorandum about cooperation between the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine and the NGO “Free Arduino” has been officially signed.
“The purpose of the Memorandum is to support the Ministry in terms of environmental monitoring, collecting and recording information about the environment state and potential threats in various regions of Ukraine, plans to develop ways of eliminating these threats, and damage calculations,” says Oleksiy Trelevskyi, the chair of the NGO “Free Arduino” and the founder of the Ukrainian network of public monitoring of air quality EcoCity. “We, as experienced developers, will help in the development of the system for the automatic collection and recording of information about environmental threats. Our smart devices use different types of sensors to monitor the content of radiation and 19 pollutants in the air to prevent dangerous levels of fouling.”
In the official EcoZagroza app, on an interactive map of Ukraine you can see the state and quality of atmospheric air and the level of radiation throughout Ukraine, in real time, with geo-referencing to the area, based on the data from the EcoCity network. And all this without any payment from the government or even the public side, thanks to the support of the project “Clean Air for Ukraine”, which is implemented by the non-governmental organizations “Arnika” (Czech Republic) and “Free Arduino” (Ivano-Frankivsk), with the financial support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic Republic and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, USA).
“Today, the network of public monitoring of air pollution in Ukraine, EcoCity, has more than 600 stations installed throughout the territory of Ukraine. Despite the horrible consequences of the war, up to 200 of these stations provide monitoring results online daily,” says Marcela Černochová, coordinator of the Czech-Ukrainian project “Clean Air for Ukraine ”. “I want to focus your attention on the fact that now the EcoCity network transfers data about levels of radiation directly from front-line territories, close to occupied ones, in particular from the area of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is the largest in Europe.”
Last year, EcoCity established cooperation with municipalities, the academic community, and the public, providing them with data on environmental pollution in real time.
“The EcoCity network cares not only about the quantities of stations but primarily about the quality and reliability of the measurements. Technical support and maintenance of stations, constant improvement of the data analysis and interpretation algorithms – all of this provides confidence in the results of public monitoring. Last year’s experiment helped determine the best sensors, the data from which differ only minimally from the reference methods,” adds Maksym Soroka, an expert on environmental safety from the “Clean Air for Ukraine” project. “This year is important for the public monitoring of air quality and the EcoCity network. Russia’s war against the Ukrainian people has stimulated the development of a new level of monitoring; we are changing outdated approaches and models of stations and increasing the number of chemical and radiation danger sensors, because this is definitely a new challenge for public monitoring during a war.”
Now the people of Ukraine can have accurate information about the air quality index on their smartphone and in the event of explosions and fires, they can quickly check the safety of the environment and also record and send data on environmental crimes. You can download an application from Google Play for free.
