Many thanks to our stellar volunteers for helping us power through the Moor Frog phase of our FrackFinder mission.  With the help of dozens of volunteers we were able to power through 4,140 sites and identify 7,835 ponds around active wellpads. Give yourselves some serious high-fives!

BUT, our work is not done.  Today, we launch into a NEW PHASE of FrackFinder… Project Dart Frog!  So, get your sorting goggles on and recruit some friends and neighbors to help us with the project.

Our latest FrackFinder effort, Project Moor Frog was aimed at locating ponds near active wellpads across Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale.  Most phases of FrackFinder build on previous projects, for example, we know where active wellpads based on the results of Project Tadpole.  Now we need you to help us sort out which of those ponds are related to fracking, and which aren’t.

This is one of the ponds skytruthers just like you helped find in Project Moor Frog. Now we need your help to sort out which of these are fracking ponds (like this one) and which ones are naturally occurring or man-made for other purposes like decoration or watering livestock.

Just to recap for you, FrackFinder PA is a multi-phase effort to map drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) across Pennsylvania using crowd-sourced image analysis of satellite and aerial imagery. We’re asking volunteers like you to help us look through images of fracking sites and tell us what you see.Ultimately, these projects will create a comprehensive map of drilling and fracking in Pennsylvania. After Pennsylvania, our goal is to create this map for the whole United States!

This is a project specifically designed to support work we are doing with our partners at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Experts there are planning to use the FrackFinder data YOU produce to study the relationship between fracking and public health issues, but first they need to know where the fracking is!

Project Dart Frog is a simple sorting project and can easily be done on any computer or tablet with a decent internet connection. Not sure you’ve got the eyes for this job?  Don’t worry!  We provide you with a simple tutorial that will put you on the fast track to pond identification.

Spread the word.  Check it out.  Make a difference.

Image: Geoff Gallice – Couresty of Wikimedia Commons

About Dart Frogs: In keeping with our amphibian themed projects, Project Dart Frog invokes colorful little critters like this Strawberry Dart Frog. We thought since we’re asking you sort out the good ponds from fracking ponds, we’d pick a brightly colored family that’s full of red frogs, blue frogs, green frogs, and bad frogs (as in bad for anyone who wants to make a meal of them since they are toxic in the wild). It’s only appropriate, don’t you think?