HowTo – Long term site reporting [20%]

Priority: low (nothing to report until early 2024)
Updating: rare until we actually begin to compose reports

This is about report contents for the owners of long term sites. These reports are confidential.

Change log:

|When|Who|Comments| |2023 06 16|Sp17|First skeleton.| |2023 07 30|Sp17|Adapted to Markdown and Quarto.| |2023 09 28|Sp17|Minor edits.|

Related HowTos:

1. Objectives

  • Provide understandable reports of promised full detail analytical data to the cooperators.
  • Encourage feedback from owners about understandability and completeness, and if they have questions.
  • Encourage interest in the entire project, beyond owners’ own property.
  • Increase literacy about pesticides in groundwater.

2. Content of reports

(This is mostly “top of head” notes.)

The reports would contain a project header similar to the one used for categorical and lake reports. This has a project title, the name of the recipient, and a Cornell logo. Beneath that is a bullet point summary of whole project status.

They would contain contact info for one person at Cornell whom they know the best, usually the person who recruited them or who collected their most recent sample.

We could have atmospheric pictures, interesting vingnettes from the project or the area of the owner. All such pictures are impossible to trace to any cooperator. These reports will be mostly “form reports”, with most content similar to other reports of the class. The categorical and lake reports are more customized to the individual cooperator since we have a deeper relationship with the cooperator and we take up more of their time.

There is potential to include a GIS map excerpt in the report. We have the geographic centroid of each site on file, and a zoom on that point plus a site-specific expansion (i.e. a site’s latitude and longitude bounding box), could create a zoomed aerial photo of interest to the cooperator. With over 30 reports to prepare this should be automated. (We also prepare 18 reports for categorical site cooperators and four reports about lakes that include maps with sampling point overlays.)

A test using the terra1 and maptiles2 mapping libraries for the R language, embedded in Quarto3 structured text, also with embedded database lookups in the R language, yielded promising results. There could be a template in the Markdown (Quarto) language that would be applied to each long term site to yield customized reports including site-specific maps and tables, probably in a Microsoft DOCX format. A last step would be to personalize each report using MS Word such as interpretations of the values of detected analytes.

Another difference from the categorical reports is that many long term wells are drinking water wells. Thus a drinking water perspective is critical. We might take the time to discover and keep up to date local technical support contacts such as County Health Departments and Soil and Water Conservation Districts. Such units are usually not aware of our sampling, and we are “on their turf”.

The substantive content differing per report would be the analytical results. We expect to have to explain the meanings of “concentrations”, chemical names (most of which they will never have heard of), drinking water standards, and detection limits. Anything detected will need a remark about the significance of the numerical result.

We will have a web link to more in depth information about the project with each report.

In the categorical and lakes reports, we included the range of all analytical results for the project for context. Probably we will include 100% coverage for the long term reports.

As we expand the analyte list, more of the analytes will have drinking water standards or ecological standards. We would include such values.

Consecutive reports to the same owner would include all previous results as well as the most recent.

Related: We have also sent thanks-notes via snail mail to all long-term cooperators, which become important when there has been an extended period without contact with the owner.

3. Timing of reports

There will be one sample per site per year, thus reporting frequency will be one report per year. Timing will depend on when the pesticide lab returns data.

There will be batching.

There could be off-cycle reports if we have an interesting analytical result; a report would help pave the way for resampling.

4. Medium and transmittal

We expect to snail-mail nearly all reports to cooperators. In a few cases we may email.

Footnotes

  1. Hijmans et al. 2023. terra: Spatial Data Analysis. URL: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/terra/↩︎

  2. Giraud et al. 2023. maptiles: Download and Display Map Tiles. URL: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/maptiles/↩︎

  3. Welcome to Quarto. An open source scientific and technical publishing system. URL: https://quarto.org↩︎