A national analytical quality assurance program: Developing guidelines and analytical tools for the forest inventory and analysis program

A rigorous quality assurance (QA) process assures that the data and information provided by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program meet the highest possible standards of precision, completeness, representativeness, comparability, and accuracy. FIA relies on its analysts to check the final data quality prior to release of a State’s data to the national FIA database (FIADB). The analytical portion of the QA process varies considerably from region to region, aided by a variety of tools developed within each region. Recognizing that a QA process consisting of national standards would result in greater consistency and transparency, the national analytical QA task team is developing guidelines for analysts and oversees the development of QA Tools, a desktop charting and graphing application for checking compiled data prior to release. QA Tools includes a rigorous estimation engine based on national standard FIA estimation procedures. Batch processing is utilized to save time and reduce the cost of extensive QA. National consistency results in fewer resources allocated to maintaining multiple processes, thus allowing analysts to spend more time on error resolution.