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QUALITY ASSURANCE METHODS MANUAL FOR FOREST SITE CLASSIFICATION AND FIELD MEASUREMENTS
Citation:
Zedaker, S. AND N. Nicholas. QUALITY ASSURANCE METHODS MANUAL FOR FOREST SITE CLASSIFICATION AND FIELD MEASUREMENTS. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/3-90/082.
Description:
The main objective of this third version of this manual is to provide a set of standardized, technically sound and well documented, methods that would allow data or measurement precision and bias to be estimated and controlled, and thus promote the comparabiLity of forestry fieLd data across sites, research projects, and time. lthough the concepts of standard operating procedures (SOPs), Quality Assurance activities, and quality control procedures have been deeply ingrained in many fields of research and manufacturing for decades, their utilization and acceptance in forestry has been minimal. niform, or standard, measurement methods are critical to projects that contribute data to some central data base for synthesis, integration, or assessment efforts. onsistent methods are particularly important to projects monitoring change to forest systems over time. tandardized methods, with known or estimable errors, contribute greatly to the confidence associated with decisions based on field data collections. he procedures are meant to serve as guidelines to the minimum activity necessary to provide high quality data for an integrated research program. inally, this methods manual should serve investigators by simply reducing the amount of documentation required for an assessment of their data quality if they simply note that the procedures used, or proposed to be used, are those suggested in this manual.