An Integrated Low-Cost Monitoring Platform to Assess Air Quality Over Large Areas L. Brilli 1(&) , F. Carotenuto 1 , B. Gioli 1 , A. Berton 2 , S. Profeti 2 , G. Gualtieri 1 , B. P. Andreini 3 , M. Stefanelli 3 , F. Martelli 1 , C. Vagnoli 1 , and A. Zaldei 1 1 National Research Council-Institute of Bioeconomy (CNR-IBE), Via Madonna del Piano 10, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy lorenzo.brilli@ibe.cnr.it 2 Dipartimento di Ricerca Traslazionale N.T.M.C, Università di Pisa, Via San Zeno 35, 56123 Pisa, Italy 3 ARPAT - Agenzia Regionale per la Protezione Ambientale della Toscana, Florence, Italy Abstract. Air pollution is currently one of the main issues affecting urbanized areas worldwide. Local administrations monitor these harmful gases by means of reference monitoring stations provided by regional/national environmental protection agencies. These stations, however, have limitations due to coarse spatial coverage of the whole municipality, low time-frequency, and high costs. In this framework, the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IBE) and the Tuscany Region Environmental Protection Agency (ARPAT) agreed to an ini- tiative to create a low-cost network aimed at monitoring air quality over an Italian urban area. The rural town of Capannori, located in the Tuscany region (Italy), was chosen as a testing area since it lies within a critical area both affected by a variety of emission sources and weather conditions unfavourable to pollutant dispersion. The air quality analysis was carried out by means of several innovative low-cost stations named AIRQino, equipped with sensors for col- lecting air pollution (PM 2.5 , PM 10 , NO 2 ,O 3 , CO, CO 2 ) and meteorological parameters (air temperature and relative humidity). Concentrations of PM were mainly considered in this work for providing indicative air quality measure- ments to supplement fixed measurements collected by the of ficial urban moni- toring network. This work, still ongoing, has two main objectives: (i) to show the robustness of AIRQino at measuring PM concentrations; (ii) to investigate the PM concentrations dynamics at higher spatial and time scale distribution compared to the reference station. Keywords: Air pollution Á Low-cost air quality stations Á Innovative sensors 1 Introduction In the last decade, the European transportation sector has considerably reduced its air pollutant emissions [1] mainly as a result of improvement in vehicle technology and renewal/turnover of vehicle fleet [2]. However, in the context of air quality impacts over urban areas, road transportation remains one of the main crucial concerns being © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Arai et al. (Eds.): FTC 2020, AISC 1289, pp. 965–975, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63089-8_63