Breathe Buffalo is a dashboard-style web application developed for the UB Air Monitoring project. This dashboard is a key dissemination product for the community-based participatory research (CBPR) study focused on air quality in Buffalo’s African-American community, particularly on the east side of Buffalo, New York.
The east side of Buffalo’s African-American community faces a disproportionate burden of chronic disease compared to neighboring regions. Poor air quality is a well-known contributor to adverse health outcomes, but until recently, it has been difficult to assess community-specific air pollution exposures due to a lack of local monitoring. To address this gap, we partnered with the Buffalo Center for Health Equity (BCHE), a local environmental justice organization, and launched a two-year air monitoring initiative using CBPR principles. t Prototypes of study results were developed to report fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and volatile organic compound (VOC) levels. An interactive data dashboard—this very application—was iteratively co-designed and refined with input from BCHE members and study participants through virtual meetings and online surveys. This process emphasized the use of color, large font for key results, and a preference for maps over traditional plots, ensuring that the dashboard is accessible, engaging, and tailored to community needs.
The dashboard serves as a central tool to communicate findings from a ten-month community air monitoring campaign. Future dissemination efforts will also include public education events and virtual meetings to share results with the broader community.
- Real-time Air Quality Monitoring: Visualize sensor data (PM2.5, VOC, etc.) on an interactive map using Leaflet.
- Zipcode-based Measurements: View air quality metrics by zipcode, with gauges and bar charts for selected regions.
- Intuitive UI: User-friendly interface built with shinydashboard (no sidebar, clean layout).
- Spatial Data Integration: Utilizes the
sfandleafletpackages to display and facilitate the analysis of spatial datasets. - Rich Visualizations: Supports various R visualization packages including plotly, ggplot2, DT for tables.
- Location Map: Real-time air quality by region, visualized on a map.
- Air Quality Gauges: Gauges showing both selected zipcode and city-wide air quality.
- Color Ramp: Visual color ramp indicating air quality levels (
Goodin green toHazardousin red).
The following R packages are required:
- shiny, shinydashboard, shinybusy, flexdashboard, lubridate, leaflet, DT, sf, data.table, base64enc, jsonlite, DBI, RPostgres, plotly, ggplot2, rsconnect
The project uses renv for dependency management:
# In the repo root
renv::restore()Store sensitive information (e.g., DB credentials) in .Renviron and place it in the repo root.
# From the repo root
shiny::runApp()or run app.R directly.
- Use
config.Rfor deployment settings (rsconnectto deploy to a server). - Easily run and deploy from within RStudio.
- Continuous Deployment:
When you push to therepo-mainbranch, the app is automatically deployed to shinyapps.io via GitHub Actions.
Breathe-Buffalo/
├── app.R # Main Shiny application code
├── config.R # Deployment (rsconnect) configuration script
├── renv/ # R package dependency management (renv)
│ ├── activate.R
│ └── ... # Other renv infrastructure files
├── renv.R # renv bootstrap/init script
├── data/ # Project data assets
│ └── zip/
│ ├── target.gpkg # Geopackage: spatial boundary/target data
│ └── zipBnd_EN.qmd # QGIS metadata or spatial config
├── .Renviron # (Not committed: for local secrets/env vars)
├── LICENSE # License file
└── README.md # Project documentation (this file)
- Some files such as
.Renvironare referenced in the code but not committed to version control. - The
renv/folder may contain additional files (lock, settings, cached packages) created by the R package management system. - Additional files or folders may exist for logs, temporary files, or user-generated content if applicable.
See the LICENSE file for details.