Sediment sampling and quality report app
Ports and marine developers sample seabed and riverbed sediment before maintenance dredging, to decide whether the material can be placed at sea or must be managed on land. Cores and grabs are taken from a sampling grid, logged by depth and texture, and analysed for metals, organotins and other contaminants. The sampling and analysis plan is usually agreed with the regulator in advance, so the report has to show it was followed sample by sample.
Built for port authorities running teams of roughly 3–50 inspectors.
Sample Sediment quality report
An illustrative excerpt. The site, readings and findings are fictional; the layout is yours to set.
Sediment quality report
Table 4 — Core logs, berth pocket
- Project
- Berth 3 maintenance dredging (fictional)
- Vessel
- Survey launch, vibrocorer
- Sampled
- 2 March 2026
| Core | Recovery and description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| B3-01 | 1.6 m; soft grey silty clay, slight H₂S odour | Status: Sampled |
| B3-02 | 1.4 m; shell hash over sandy silt | Status: Sampled |
| B3-05 | 0.4 m recovery; refusal on hard layer | Status: Re-core |
| B3-07 | Not attempted — vessel movements | Status: Deferred |
Fields captured on site
Your firm builds the form in-app, so these are a starting point rather than a fixed schema. Every field is captured on the device, with or without signal, and lands in the sediment quality report where your template puts it.
Per core or grab
- Station ID and coordinates
- Water depth
- Penetration and recovery
- Sediment description by depth
- Odour and visible contamination
- Sub-sample IDs
Event
- Vessel and method
- Tide and sea state
- Decontamination between stations
Standards the report works to
- National Assessment Guidelines for Dredging 2009National Assessment Guidelines for Dredging (Commonwealth of Australia)
- Sampling density, analytes and screening levels for material proposed for sea disposal.
- ANZG 2018Australian and New Zealand Guidelines for Fresh and Marine Water Quality
- Sediment quality guideline values used for screening.
Load the standards you hold into your reference library and the drafted prose is written against them rather than against a general model.
How the sediment quality report gets built
Capture it once, offline
Your firm builds the sediment sampling form in-app — 25 field types, nesting repeatable groups, compound AND/OR visibility rules, reusable modules and calculated fields. Field capture works with no signal: jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio all queue in an idempotent outbox that only clears once the server confirms receipt.
Link it to your sample locations
Enter sample locations once, as a register. Every one of your samples, bores and monitoring rounds then points at a stored row rather than a name somebody typed — and the links survive a disconnected device.
Render your own template
The sediment quality report renders into the Word template you already use — your letterhead, your section order, your clause library — with conditionals, loops over repeats, composable sub-templates and photo grids.
Reviewed before it leaves
You write the review framework: a checklist of what a sediment quality report must contain, plus the prose standards you would mark a junior against. Link it to a report template and it runs every time that template renders. Each finding comes back graded info, minor or major, quoting the sentence at fault, and a person accepts or dismisses every one.
Because the structured submission behind the report is held too, the review is a comparison rather than a proofread: The report says every bore was sampled to three metres; the form has BH07 refused at 1.2 m.
Checks a environmental framework usually carries
- Every exceedance in the results tables is discussed in the assessment text
- The guideline values cited match the land use actually being assessed
- No sample or bore ID appears in the prose that is absent from the data
- Data gaps, refusals and deviations from the sampling plan are stated as limitations
Questions
- Can each core carry several sub-samples by depth?
- Yes. Sub-samples are a repeat nested under each core, so the log and the sample list stay consistent.
- Can we show a planned station that was not sampled?
- Stations come from a register, so planned but unsampled stations still appear with the reason recorded.
- Will the report check our results narrative against the field logs?
- The report review compares the document with the captured core data and raises any station or depth described in the text that the logs contradict.
What this is not
Worth knowing before you book a demo, so neither of us wastes the half hour.
- Not field-service dispatch. No timesheets, no parts, no inventory. Scheduling exists to get an inspector to a site.
- No signature capture. If your deliverable has to carry a signed sign-off on the artefact itself, this is not the tool yet.
- Field capture is what works offline — jobs, forms, photos, notes and audio. Reports, chat, scheduling and the inbox need a connection.
- No client portal. Reports go out as a file or a password-protected link.
Other environmental work we cover
- Beach water quality samplingBeach watch report
- Carbon project monitoringCarbon audit evidence
- Contaminated land auditsAudit evidence pack
- Environmental license compliance roundsLicense condition checklist
- Erosion and sediment auditsESC compliance report
- Groundwater monitoring roundsMonitoring event report
- Hazardous materials surveysHazmat register
- Illegal dumping investigationsDumping incident report
Other disciplines
Rebuild your sediment quality report in SurveyThanks
Bring the Word template you already send clients. If you are coming off another field-forms tool, a filled report can be uploaded, read field by field, and re-rendered into your template.