Citizen science gas detection: “We need more boots on the ground”
Julie Vastine is Director of the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring based out of Dickinson College. ALLARM started in 1986 enlisting the help of average citizens to monitor streams for the impacts of acid rain. Since the early 2000s, the program has encouraged citizen science to help communities answer their own questions about the health of their local watersheds.
Then, the shale boom hit. Vastine says the big question lately has been how all the drilling and fracking and laying of new pipelinesmight be affecting thousands of miles of Pennsylvania’s streams.