Environment and Health Seminar Series: Trusting your senses, how community members identify air quality issues with Dr. Matthew Adams

The School of the Environment invites you to virtually attend this seminar led by Dr. Matthew Adams, as part of our 2026 Environment and Health Seminar Series.

Register here to attend online.

About the Seminar

This presentation examines the critical role of human perception in urban air quality monitoring, arguing that community observations and lived experiences provide complementary evidence that fixed sensor networks alone cannot capture. While conventional monitoring systems are designed to track regulatory pollutants at limited locations and time scales, residents routinely notice odours, visible plumes, physical symptoms, and changes in their environment that signal short-term or highly localized pollution episodes. These events are often transient, spatially heterogeneous, and easily missed by sparsely distributed monitors or time-averaged datasets.

Drawing on examples of community-based air monitoring initiatives, the presentation will show how systematically incorporating resident reports, odour logs, and place-based narratives into monitoring programs can enhance the detection, timing, and characterization of these episodes. It will discuss practical approaches for integrating community observations with low-cost sensors and regulatory data, including shared protocols for recording observations, co-developed sampling strategies, and simple tools for visualizing and validating community-identified hotspots.

Using the expertise of people who live with air pollution daily, this work highlights how perception-based evidence can guide more responsive sampling, identify gaps in existing monitoring networks, and surface environmental justice concerns that may otherwise remain invisible. The presentation will conclude with recommendations for researchers, regulators, and community organizations on how to embed lived experience into urban air quality monitoring in a rigorous, ethical, and policy-relevant way.

About the Speaker

Matthew Adams is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Director of the Centre for Urban Environments. His research integrates geospatial modeling, environmental science, and public health to investigate urban air pollution exposure, environmental justice, and equity. Using mixed methods and open‑source data, Dr. Adams works to understand how where you live shapes your health. His work includes local to international research projects. He has secured funding from national agencies and collaborated with municipal, provincial and federal partners, supervising multiple postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. His interdisciplinary approach not only enriches academic discourse but also drives real-world change in urban sustainability and community well‑being.