Stony Brook Student Cultivates AI to Unmask Hidden Air Pollution

In a quiet corner of Stony Brook University Hospital, a unique garden is blossoming, not just with plants, but with a mission to reveal an unseen threat: ground-level ozone. 

Undergraduate student Amy Chen is cultivating a pioneering project to use artificial intelligence to detect ozone damage on plants.

Her desire for research experience and a yearning to be outdoors after too much time in front of a computer screen led her to create an ozone garden under the direction of Guanyu Huang, assistant professor at the Program in Public Health and School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. 

The single-bed ozone garden is atop the Health Sciences Center — home to the Stony Brook Heights Rooftop Micro-Farm, a 2,242 square foot gardening space filled with fresh, organic vegetables and herbs to support patient nutrition and managed by the Nutrition Division of Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine and a largely student volunteer corps. 

“I’ve never had direct research experience other than like in some of my classes,” said Chen, an information systems major who is minoring in environmental studies. “I wanted to do something that involves me being outside because I really miss being in nature.”

The ozone garden is part of a broader initiative: the National Ozone Garden Network, funded by NASA’s TEAM II program. This network provides specific bio-indicator plant species — such as milkweed, potatoes, snap beans and coneflowers — that visibly react to ozone pollution. 

“Plants can serve as bio-indicators of ozone, and so that means they can visually show the ozone damage on the leaves of their plants,” Huang said. He added that the garden offers “an opportunity to tell the people what’s going on, what’s the damage of ozone, not only public health, but also plants and agriculture.”

Visible signs of ozone damage include discoloration, such as yellowing, spots and stippling, and leaves dropping prematurely. The snap beans, in particular, have thrived in the Stony Brook garden, showing clear signs for detection, Chen noted. The network also provides an air quality sensor to record relevant measurements, which are recorded to a national database for scientists like Huang to investigate.

Preliminary data from June and July showed relatively low ozone concentrations in Stony Brook, consistent with other atmospheric measuring systems. However, Suffolk County’s air fails to meet federal standards for ozone year after year, according to the American Lung Association. 

Catherine Kier, professor of pediatrics and division chief of pediatric pulmonary of Stony Brook Medicine, explains that repeated years of high ozone due to local on-road vehicles and industrial sites locally and elsewhere in the U.S. “can have an impact on people’s health, especially seniors, children and other vulnerable populations,” as well as during extreme heat days.

The plants still show signs of ozone damage, which Huang warns, “can harm our commercial farming agricultural production and impact human health.”

“We want to show people that the air pollution is real. We actually can see it,” Haung said. “We want to visualize the damage of their air pollution to show not only damage to the plants but also to our health.”

Chen’s role is evolving beyond just planting and observation, thanks to SUNY SOAR (Summer Opportunity for Academic Research) program. “In the upcoming fall, I’ll be working on more of a technical side. So we want to implement a convolutional neural network — or an AI model — that helps automatically detect the ozone damage on the leaves,” she said. 

This innovative approach will involve using a GoPro to capture images of the plant leaves, then analyzing them to detect and quantify ozone damage. The AI model will also integrate other environmental variables like temperature and cloud coverage. Until now, data collection has been “an all-round experience,” continuing daily as the plants grow.

This project will form a crucial part of Chen’s undergraduate thesis, aiding her in her research career. But the broader goal extends beyond scientific papers. 

Becca Hatheway, director of the UCAR Center for Science Education in Boulder, Colorado, which is affiliated with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and houses the National Ozone Garden Network, explained the data collected from these gardens nationally provides vital information on “the levels of ozone spatially across different locations and also temporal, like when in the season the damage is showing up.” She said the data that Stony Brook and the network collect can help make air quality alerts responsive and vital for vulnerable individuals.

“At our network workshop, our garden hosts will do some training, come together and talk about ideas and resources. We also provide a stipend that can give support to the garden hosts to do the activities that you are already doing in their garden here at Stony Brook,” Hatheway said. “Other places are using it to actually build out a garden if they didn’t have any — Stony Brook has a wonderful garden space here.”