Quality Assurance Planning for Region 9

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The ultimate success of an environmental program or project depends on the quality of the environmental data collected and used in decision-making, and this may depend significantly on the adequacy of the quality assurance project plan and how it is carried out. EPA Region 9 requires that a systematic process be used, wherever possible and appropriate to plan all environmental data generation activities.

To facilitate the development of objectives, EPA has developed guidances to help state and tribal governments develop Quality Assurance Program Plans (QAPPs) in documenting the type and quality of data needed for environmental decisions and in describing the methods for collecting and assessing those data.

Quality Assurance Project Planning

The purpose of the QA Project Plan is to document planning results for environmental data collection and to provide a project-specific blueprint for obtaining the type and quality of environmental data needed for a specific decision or use.

The QA Project Plan documents how quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) are applied to an environmental data operation to assure that the results obtained are of the type and quality needed and expected.

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Examples

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Sampling and Analysis Plan Guidance and Templates

These documents can be downloaded and used to write a sampling and analysis plan.

Guidance to assist Region 9 Wetland Grant recipients in documenting the procedural and data requirements for projects involving environmental measurements.

Version 2.0 of the Region 9 Wetlands QAPP Guidance provides additional clarifying language in a number of sections and incorporates references to newer wetlands assessment methods, such as the California Rapid Assessment Method, and to the new federal rule for "Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources." The basic format of the guidance remains unchanged from the original version (1.0, September 2004).

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Quality Assurance Management Planning

A Quality Management Plan documents how an organization structures its quality system and describes its quality policies and procedures, criteria for and areas of application, and roles, responsibilities, and authorities. It also describes an organization's policies and procedures for implementing and assessing the effectiveness of the quality system.

These documents describe the elements of a quality system that are documented in a Quality Management Plan. For more information about EPA quality assurance requirements:

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