United States
                  Environmental Protection
                  Agency
                                  Office of Research
                                  and Development
                                  Washington, DC 20460
EPA/620/R-02/001e
September, 2002
                  Coastal   Communications
                   NATIONAL COASTAL  ASSESSMENT:
                   TRAINING  & QUALITY  ASSURANCE

Background
The U.S. EPA's National Coastal Assessment (NCA) is a five year effort led by EPA's Office of
Research and Development to evaluate the assessment methods it has developed to advance the
science of ecosystem condition monitoring. This program surveys
the condition of the nation's coastal resources by creating an
integrated and comprehensive monitoring program among the
coastal states. Using a probabilistic sampling design and a common
set of survey indicators, each state conducts surveys and assesses
the condition of their coastal resources. These independent
estimates can then be aggregated to assess conditions at regional,
biogeographical, and national scales.

Approach
(Siven the diverse partnerships formed for this program, one of
the biggest challenges is in collecting and producing high quality
and comparable data. To address this challenge, the NCA program has incorporated several Quality
Assurance procedures; including training of field crews, visits to crews during sampling events;
visits to analytical laboratories; and technical assistance to field or laboratory personnel.  Several
documents were also prepared for the NCA program; including the Field Operations Manual (see
Cover); Quality Assurance Project Plan; and the Coastal 2000 Northeast Fish Pathology Field (Suide
                        and Northeast Information Management Manual. Initial training of
                        state field crews was conducted at each state in the first year (2000)
                        of the program. The week-long training program, usually conducted in
                        the state by EPA NCA Coordinators, provided an overview of the
                        program and its goals and a description of the indicators and sampling
                        procedures; and was followed by several days of comprehensive, hands-
                        on field sampling exercises. The training was customized for each
                        state crew to accommodate differences in gear, vessel size and crew
                        backgrounds, as well as state-specific human safety concerns such as
                        hypothermia and use of emergency  immersion suits. Each field crew
                        was required to demonstrate proficiency in all sampling tasks before
the NCA Coordinator certified the field crew to conduct sampling.  Similarly, all laboratories had to
demonstrate proficiency before they were certified to  conduct analyses on the samples collected
under the NCA program.

Further Information
For further information on the NCA Program, or if you wish to obtain any of the NCA documents
described above, please contact the individuals listed below:
Donald Cobb, NCA Northeast Field Coordinator, (401)782-9616, cobb.donald@epa.gov
Joseph LiVoIsi, NCA Northeast QA  Coordinator, (401)782-3163, livolsi.joseph@epa.gov
Kevin Summers, NCA National Coordinator, (850)934-9244, summers.kevin@epa.gov
John Macauley, NCA National QA Coordinator, (850)934-9353,  macauley.john@epa.gov
To learn more about the NCA Program, please visit: http://www.epa.gov/emap/nca/index.html.
Visit the Coastal Communications Web site at http://www.epa.gov/ged/crc.htm.
National Coastal
Assessment
       >filal Monitoring and
   Asaessmcni Program

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