Environmental Justice Project

A cooperative project between the Long Island Science Center, Department of Environmental Conservation & Environmental Protection Agency

Mission Statement:

The Environmental Justice Project, additionally titled the Citizen Science Environmental Monitoring – The Health of Our Local Ecosystem, is a multifaceted project designed to create opportunities for citizen scientists to investigate the health of their local ecosystem. This project aims to engage the public with their community’s environmental and ecological health by creating pipelines for STEM jobs through multiple avenues. We provide local, community-engaging, educational opportunities in hands-on field data collection and publicly available educational programs.

This project oversees the seasonal-term collection of environmental data indicative of the overall health of the air and waterbodies in the Riverhead and Southampton areas. The results of each testing period and more information about the health implications of the environmental conditions studied are accessible through the Long Island Science Center Environmental Justice pages.

Community members can join our environmental justice interns and staff in the field for our field study program. The field study program allows participants to learn how we conduct our study and test a sample of the air and water with our team. Additionally, we offer a mobile Environmental Education program which covers the significance of the ecological role of air, water, and biodiversity, especially relating to our role as humans within the natural world.

What we Do

The Environmental Justice Interns and Staff test 6 sites for the air quality and 7 waterbodies to measure certain parameters that indicate their overall health. The interns and staff are currently sampling the same sites to collect data for the 2024 study. Click the tabs to learn more about the testing parameters and the findings from the Summer-Fall 2023!