Utilizing Web-Based Public Participation Geographical Information Systems: Filling Gaps of the Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Industry

An influx of natural gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale region of the United States presents serious environmental, public health, and social and behavioral health challenges to citizens, policymakers, enforcement agencies and industry. These challenges necessitated improved and more transparent data-sharing capacities between data ‘owners ’ and data ‘users. ’ FracTracker (www.fractracker.org) is a socially-networked public participation GIS formulated with the capacity to support both a knowledge collective and a geographical data mashup. FracTracker is a GeoWeb data repository focusing on the natural gas industry. This tool facilitates crowdsourced data and allows registered users to visualize the information as part of an empowerment design process. A concurrent storied-blog serves as the portal to the PPGIS tool, and synthesizes and translates data to further engage geographical and issue-based populations. The main features of FracTracker are the ability to blog and share drilling stories, upload and download geo-located data as various file types, visualize data onto basemaps, and save the visualizations as snapshots. FracTracker can be used to compare data and identify spatial patterns related to the shale gas industry to better understand the span of social, economic, land use, political, environmental, and public health considerations