Candie C. Wilderman is a Professor Emerita of Environmental Sciences at Dickinson College.
Jinnie Monismith is the Assistant Director of the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM) at Dickinson College.

The rapid growth of the natural gas extraction industry in Pennsylvania and neighboring states has stirred concerned citizens to seek ways to collect data on water quality impacts from the extraction activities. As a response to requests from community members, the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM) developed a volunteer-friendly protocol in 2010 for early detection and reporting of surface water contamination by shale gas extraction activities in small streams. To date, ALLARM has trained more than 2,000 volunteers in Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia to monitor water quality (conductivity, barium, strontium, and total dissolved solids) and physical parameters (stream stage and visual observations) prior to, during, and after shale gas wells have been developed. This paper documents the operational models of Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) used by ALLARM, describes the volunteer monitoring protocol developed, and examines three years of water quality results from hundreds of monitoring sites in Pennsylvania and New York.

Wilderman, Candie C., and Jinnieth Monismith. Monitoring Marcellus: A Case Study of a Collaborative Volunteer Monitoring Project to Document the Impact of Unconventional Shale Gas Extraction on Small Streams. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice 1, no. 1, (2016): 7, pp. 1–17. https://theoryandpractice.citizenscienceassociation.org/articles/10.5334/cstp.20

Copyright: © 2016 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Open access publication of this article was made possible with grant support from Waidner-Spahr Library distributed through the Dickinson College Research & Development Committee.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit Citizen Science: Theory and Practice's Website. https://theoryandpractice.citizenscienceassociation.org/articles/10.5334/cstp.20

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice is an Open Access, peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Citizen Science Association.