The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has the mission to conceive and execute civil works projects in the nation's waterways. Projects relating to this mission are subject to various environmental regulations that require the collection of environmental data for project planning, design, construction, and operation. These data-collection processes must be performed under controlled conditions to be legally defensible. An effective quality assurance (QA) plan is needed to meet these requirements. in response to the need for a guidance document to assist Corps personnel with the preparation of QA project plans, a task group met and recommended the preparation of a single standardized approach that would be applicable to all civil works data-collection programs. This guidance report was prepared in response to this recommendation.

Part 1 of the Uniform Federal Policy for Quality Assurance Project Plans (the UFP-QAPP Manual), prepared by the Intergovernmental Data Quality Task Force (IDQTF), provides instructions for preparing Quality Assurance Project Plans (QAPPs). It is the companion document to the IDQTF's Uniform Federal Policy for Implementing Environmental Quality Systems (UFP-QS). The UFP-QS was developed to consistently implement the quality system requirements of ANSI/ASQ EA, Quality Systems for Environmental Data and Technology Programs - Requirements with guidance for use, Section 5 (Part A). Similarly, this UFP-QAPP Manual has been developed to consistently implement the project-specific requirements in Section 6 of that standard (ANSI/ASQ E4). This Manual requires that QAPP be approved for all environmental data collection projects. The QAPP will integrate technical and quality control aspects of a project throughout its life cycle, including planning, implementation, assessment, and corrective actions. The QAPP will present the steps that will be taken to ensure that environmental data collected are of the correct type and quality required for specific decision or use. It will present an organized and systematic description of the ways in which quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) will be applied to the collection and use of environmental data.