ShaleNetwork Workshop Held April 22-23 in State College, PA
April 2012
Forty-one participants attended the ShaleNetwork Workshops at the Atherton Hotel, State College, PA on April 22-23, 2012. The workshop was presented by researchers from Penn State University, the University of Pittsburgh, Dickinson College, and the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI). With funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF), these researchers have been working since October 2011 to create the ShaleNetwork database as an online database. The ShaleNetwork team is also testing whether the inclusion of data from groups of citizen scientists can promote discovery and public education. The database currently contains data from community watershed groups, academic scientists, government agencies, and industry and includes analyses of 60 different constituents for some samples.
Of the 41 workshop attendees, 23 derived from universities, 6 from government agencies, 2 from environmental consulting firms, 3 from county district offices, and 7 from non-profit organizations. The participants were introduced to the ShaleNetwork database through HydroDesktop (www.hydrodesktop.org) a publicly available web service maintained by CUAHSI. By placing the ShaleNetwork database online at a CUAHSI Hydroserver, the data can be accessed along with data from the United States Geologic Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other groups hosting data on Hydroservers around the country. Currently, data has been uploaded for surface waters, groundwaters, waste effluent, flowback and production waters.
For additional information regarding the workshop and ShaleNetwork, the website can be found at: http://www.shalenetwork.org/