Reports & Planning Documents

Plateau TechComm has written and edited many types of reports and planning documents, including:

• Watershed assessments
• Hydrogeologic characterization reports
• Environmental impact assessments
• Comprehensive plans
• Remedial investigation reports
• Groundwater modeling reports
• Monitoring reports
• Design specifications

Descriptions of some representative projects follow.

Coconino County 2003 Comprehensive Plan

Plateau TechComm edited and indexed this extensive planning document, which won an “Award of Excellence” from the Society for Technical Communication. The Comprehensive Plan now serves as the Coconino County’s primary roadmap for growth. Achievements for this project included:

• Cutting the original 200-page text down to about 120 pages by eliminating redundancy.

• Imposing internal consistency in style, organization, and logic — a challenge given the large number of original contributors.

• Ensuring the document’s usability for planning staff, residents, developers, and others.

• Ensuring that the goals and policies specified in the plan were clearly supported in the background text.

• Providing input on document design and portability for online distribution.

You can download part or all of the plan at the Coconino County Web site.

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Watershed Assessment Report

Plateau TechComm edited this nearly 200-page report detailing the results of a multidisciplinary basin assessment in southwestern Washington. Achievements for this project included:

• Imposing internal consistency in terminology, style, structure, and level of detail throughout the document, which had multiple authors.

• Ensuring that the content of each chapter related clearly to the Limiting Factors Analysis framework and the goals established in the Introduction.

• Designing a readable document template.

Wellfield Feasibility Report

Plateau TechComm edited a report detailing the results of groundwater flow modeling to predict the impacts of pumping from a proposed wellfield in southwestern Washington. Achievements for this project included:

• Imposing consistency in terminology, style, structure, and level of detail throughout the document, which had multiple authors.

• Clarifying the report’s focus by better integrating the modeling results with the water-quality analysis.

• Ensuring that discussions of model development, implementation, and results were cohesive and readable.

• Relating discussions about the regional hydrogeology to the description of contaminant sources that could affect the wellfield capture zone.

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Hydrogeologic Characterization Report

While employed at Pacific Groundwater Group, Nancy Riccio wrote, edited, and performed much of the characterization work for this large-scale project in the Puget Sound area of western Washington. The culmination of a 5-year investigation, the Hydrogeologic Characterization Report included nearly 200 pages of text, plus supporting illustrations, tables, and several volumes of appendices. Nancy also worked closely with other investigators on the project team to document the configuration and results of groundwater flow modeling. Her duties on this project included:

• Developing a conceptual hydrogeologic model for a complex glaciofluvial system using data from well logs and aquifer testing. As part of this project, Nancy created 40 cross-sections, refining them periodically as new information became available.

• Imposing consistency in terminology, style, structure, and level of detail throughout the main report and its appendices.

• Ensuring that all report chapters and appendices related to each other, as well as to the conceptual hydrogeologic model.

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Biological Evaluation Report

Plateau TechComm edited a report summarizing the results of a biological evaluation for a large-scale wetland restoration project along the lower Colorado River. This report documented how seven proposed restoration actions might affect federally listed species—plants, invertebrates, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. It also documented potential changes to bird habitat. Substantive editing focused on several key issues and included:

• Organizing the document so that background information appeared at the beginning and the discussions within each subsection of the evaluation were consistent.

• Identifying data gaps and inconsistencies.

• Adding overview information and headings to increase document usability.

• Resolving issues related to figure and table numbering.

• Creating a readable, style-based project template.

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