Environmental Science Editing and Proofreading Services

The stream's nitrate concentration has doubled since 2009 and there is a new intensive dairy operation in the catchment. The paper says the operation is responsible. It may well be. But rainfall was above average in three of the last five years, the sewage works upgraded its consent, a plantation was felled upstream, and the sampling regime changed in 2016 — and until those are dealt with, the conclusion is a coincidence with a citation.

We edit what environmental scientists write — monitoring and trend analyses, source apportionment and attribution studies, catchment and airshed assessments, contaminated land and remediation reporting, environmental impact assessment chapters, ecosystem service and modelling work, regulatory submissions and technical reports, and papers, theses and grant applications. Our editors work on the attribution argument.

Attributing an environmental change to a cause is the hardest thing environmental science writing does, and its failure is a correlation presented as a finding. Environmental systems have many drivers acting at once and most of them move together. We work through these so the alternative explanations are listed as a set and each one addressed rather than a preferred cause asserted, since a reader's first response is to name the driver you left out; so the candidate causes are separated by evidence that distinguishes them — isotopic signature, spatial gradient, timing relative to a known event, tracer or marker species — because narrative plausibility cannot do this work; so natural variability is quantified from the record before a trend is called a change, given that many series contain decadal swings larger than the effect being reported; so any change in method, laboratory, detection limit or sampling frequency is stated with its date, as these produce steps in a series that look exactly like environmental change; so the magnitude is put in a context the reader can weigh — against a standard, a background level or a flux; so uncertainty is carried into the conclusion rather than reported and then dropped; and so what the study cannot distinguish is stated plainly. Reports written this way withstand the review that matters.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including monitoring data, site information and reports prepared for regulators or in contemplation of proceedings. We are editors rather than environmental scientists, and we offer no view on sources, causation or compliance. What we can do is make the attribution argument hold together.