RCN-SEES: The Marcellus Shale Research Network

该提案由NSF的科学，工程和可持续发展教育（SEES）活动资助，旨在应对创造可持续发展世界的挑战。该提案旨在开发一个可持续的RCN，以组织和生成宾夕法尼亚州从马塞勒斯页岩中提取天然气领域收集的水化学和流量数据的知识。我们将专注于研究假设：马塞勒斯页岩的可持续发展将通过创建由流域团体，政府机构，行业利益相关者和大学共同开发的地球化学和水文数据库来实现，以记录自然变异性和潜在的环境影响。该提案的重点是宾夕法尼亚州，这是美国最大的新页岩气开采地。该网络将由宾夕法尼亚州立大学和皮特大学这两所研究型大学以及一所私立文理学院迪金森学院与水文科学促进大学联盟合作领导。（CUAHSI）。合作的具体目标将是：i）确定宾夕法尼亚州收集马塞勒斯页岩天然气开采区域水质和水量数据的团体; ii）通过举办三次年度会议来讨论和组织这些数据，在这些团体之间建立和发展可持续的网络; iii）通过与CUAHSI合作，将水数据组织成一个数据库，以评估整个天然气开采区域的背景和影响，从而促进网络的发展; iv）培训两名研究生开发和使用数据库，以确定页岩气开采的可能影响，v）促进社区团体组织，收集和解释水数据; ㈥利用地理信息系统评价水文地球化学数据，其中包括人口和经济数据，以评价潜在的公共卫生风险因素。 该项目的一个关键方面是农村社会学家Kathryn Brasier的参与，她正在调查Marcellus页岩开发的社会影响。这一奋进也将得到迪金森的两名成员的帮助？s ALARM，水资源监测联盟，一个全国公认的技术和方案支持中心，25年来一直致力于促进对巴勒斯坦权力机构流域问题感兴趣的社区组织。RCN-SEES将与针对匹兹堡不同高中的成功教师研究经验计划密切合作。 拟议的努力将表明，自然和扰动系统的基本知识可以从包括公民科学家在内的抽样中收集。重点将是宾夕法尼亚州的沃茨，可能会受到马塞勒斯页岩开采的影响。目前在马塞卢斯有3,200多口威尔斯井，但未来可能会钻10万口。钻井的快速扩张已经超过了国家？的能力，记录钻井前的地表水质量，并将妨碍其能力，以保持监测到未来？这主要是因为钻井的分布式和移动的性质，以及PA每单位土地面积的河流英里数比美国任何其他州都多的事实。许多团体已经开始监测马塞勒斯地区的河流和地下水。然而，数据收集工作没有得到协调，也没有人整理数据，以记录自然背景水平或广泛区域的可能污染物。该RCN提案将资助为PA建立此类流量和化学数据库，使用从志愿者到机构资助的实时数据收集等来源收集的数据。为了利用来自各种来源的大量数据，我们需要包括关键元数据并提供质量保证/质量控制。 RCN研讨会和数据库将吸引研究人员，机构，行业利益相关者和社区组织者回答一个具有挑战性的科学问题：可以从不同科学家和相关公民团体收集的数据中产生社会相关知识吗？我们假设答案是？什么事？

This proposal is funded under NSF's Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) activities, which aim to address the challenge of creating a sustainable world. This proposal is to develop a sustainable RCN to organize and generate knowledge from water chemistry and flow data collected in Pennsylvania in the area of extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus shale. We will focus on the research hypothesis: Sustainable development of the Marcellus Shale will be enabled by creation of a database of geochemistry and hydrology developed by watershed groups, government agencies, industry stakeholders, and universities working together to document natural variability and potential environmental impacts. The proposal focuses on Pennsylvania, the site of the largest new shale gas play in the United States. The network will be led by two research universities, Penn State and Pitt, and a private liberal arts college, Dickinson, in collaboration with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI). The specific goals of the collaboration will be to i) identify the groups in Pennsylvania that are collecting water quality and quantity data in the region of natural gas extraction from Marcellus shale; ii) create and grow a sustainable network among these groups by conducting three annual meetings to discuss and organize this data; iii) facilitate the network by working with CUAHSI to organize the water data into a database that can be used to assess background and impacts across the gas extraction region; iv) train two graduate students in the development and use of a database to determine possible impacts of shale gas extraction, v) facilitate community groups to organize, collect, and interpret water data; vi) evaluate hydrogeochemical data using GIS that incorporates population and economic data in order to evaluate the potential for public health risk factors. A key aspect of the project is the involvement of a rural sociologist, Kathryn Brasier, who is investigating social impacts of Marcellus Shale development. This endeavor will also be aided by two members of Dickinson?s ALLARM, the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring, a nationally recognized technical and programmatic support center that has worked for 25 years to facilitate community organizations interested in watershed issues in PA. The RCN-SEES will work closely with a successful Research Experience for Teachers program that targets diverse high schools in Pittsburgh. The proposed effort will demonstrate that fundamental knowledge of natural and perturbed systems can be gleaned from sampling that includes citizen scientists. The focus will be Pennsylvania waters that may be impacted by exploitation of the Marcellus shale. At present there are over 3,200 wells drilled in the Marcellus but up to 100,000 could be drilled in the future. The rapid expansion of drilling has outpaced the state?s ability to document the pre-drilling surface water quality and will hamper its ability to maintain monitoring into the future ? largely because of the distributed and mobile nature of drilling and the fact that PA has more miles of stream per unit land area than any other state in the U.S. Many groups have started to monitor rivers and groundwaters in the Marcellus region. However, data collection is not coordinated and no one has collated data to document natural background levels or possible contaminants across broad regions. This RCN proposal will fund the establishment of such a database of flow and chemistry for PA using data collected from sources ranging from volunteers to agency-funded real-time data collection. To utilize this large range of data from various sources will require that we include key metadata and provide quality assurance/quality control. The RCN workshops and database will engage researchers, agencies, industry stakeholders, and community organizers to answer a challenging scientific question: can societally-relevant knowledge be generated from data collected by diverse groups of scientists and concerned citizens? We hypothesize that the answer is ?yes?.