RCN-SEES: The Marcellus Shale Research Network

该提案由美国国家科学基金会的科学、工程和可持续发展教育(SEES)活动资助，旨在应对创造一个可持续发展世界的挑战。这项提议是开发一个可持续的区域资源网络，从宾夕法尼亚州收集的马塞卢斯页岩天然气开采领域的水化学和流动数据中组织和产生知识。我们将重点放在研究假设上：马塞卢斯页岩的可持续发展将通过创建一个由流域组织、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学数据库来实现，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，这是美国最大的页岩气新项目所在地。该网络将由宾夕法尼亚州立大学和皮特大学两所研究型大学和一所私立文科学院迪金森学院领导，并与大学促进水文科学联合会(CUAHSI)合作。合作的具体目标将是：i)确定宾夕法尼亚州在马塞卢斯页岩天然气开采地区收集水质和数量数据的团体；ii)通过举行三次年度会议讨论和组织这些数据，在这些团体之间创建和发展一个可持续的网络；iii)通过与CUAHSI合作，将水数据组织到一个数据库中，以用于评估整个天然气开采地区的背景和影响；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；六)利用结合了人口和经济数据的地理信息系统评估水文地球化学数据，以评估公共健康风险因素的可能性。该项目的一个关键方面是农村社会学家凯瑟琳·布雷西尔的参与，她正在调查马塞卢斯页岩开发的社会影响。这项工作还将得到迪金森-S联盟的两名成员的帮助，该联盟是一个全国性的技术和方案支持中心，已工作了25年，为对宾夕法尼亚州分水岭问题感兴趣的社区组织提供帮助。RCN-SEE将与一个成功的教师研究经验计划密切合作，该计划针对匹兹堡的不同高中。这项拟议的工作将证明，可以从包括公民科学家在内的采样中收集关于自然和扰动系统的基本知识。焦点将是可能受到马塞卢斯页岩开采影响的宾夕法尼亚州水域。目前，马塞卢斯已钻探了3200多口井，但未来可能会钻探多达10万口。钻探的快速扩张速度已经超过了国家？S记录钻探前地表水水质的能力，是否会阻碍其未来保持监测的能力？这在很大程度上是因为钻探的分布式和移动性，以及宾夕法尼亚州每单位土地面积的河流里程比美国其他任何州都多的事实。许多组织已经开始监测马塞卢斯地区的河流和地下水。然而，数据收集不协调，没有人整理数据来记录广泛地区的自然本底水平或可能的污染物。RCN的这项提议将利用从志愿者到机构资助的实时数据收集的各种来源收集的数据，为PA建立这样一个流动和化学数据库。要利用来自不同来源的如此广泛的数据，我们将需要包括关键的元数据并提供质量保证/质量控制。RCN研讨会和数据库将促使研究人员、机构、行业利益攸关方和社区组织者回答一个具有挑战性的科学问题：能否从不同的科学家群体和关心的公民收集的数据中产生与社会相关的知识？我们假设答案是什么？是吗？

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?.