EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 



Dredging and disposal activities 

 within the jurisdiction of the U.S. 

 Army Corps of Engineers New England 

 Division (NED) have had a high public 

 profile over the past two decades 

 because of potential water-use conflicts 

 in this highly populated region. To 

 address regional concerns as well as 

 federally mandated criteria and 

 guidelines for open-water dredged 

 material disposal, NED initiated the 

 DAMOS (Disposal Area Monitoring 

 System) program in 1977. The DAMOS 

 program has evolved a great deal over 

 the past 15 years in the course of 

 monitoring nine regional and several 

 project-specific disposal sites extending 

 from western Long Island Sound to 

 Maine. During the past four years, 

 scientists at NED and SAIC, along with 

 a Technical Advisory Committee (TAG), 

 have developed a tiered monitoring 

 protocol for the DAMOS program to 

 provide guidelines and a logical 

 structure for the monitoring program, 

 and to establish a system of decision 

 criteria based on program 

 management objectives. 



This tiered monitoring protocol is a 

 major advance from past monitoring 

 programs, because it is based on the 

 testing of null hypotheses. A null 

 hypothesis is a statement about the 

 status of a system of interest relative to 

 a control or alternate condition; it is 

 the basis for all statistical testing as 

 well as the underpinning for good 

 experimental design. The term "null" 

 used in this context means that the 

 initial assumption or hypothesis is one 

 of no difference between the status of 

 an "experimental population" (e.g., the 

 density of opportunistic pioneering 

 fauna at a disposal site) versus a 

 "control population" (e.g., the density 



of opportunistic pioneering fauna on 

 the ambient bottom). The acceptance 

 or rejection of the null (no difference) 

 hypothesis is based on a 

 mathematically derived probability 

 value (chosen beforehand) that 

 sampling or chance alone would 

 explain any difference found between 

 the two populations assuming the null 

 hypothesis is true. The null 

 hypotheses that serve as a foundation 

 for the DAMOS tiered monitoring 

 protocol help focus the field 

 monitoring program on critical issues 

 for making management decisions. 

 This eliminates the tendency for a 

 "shotgun" approach to monitoring. 

 Each observation is required to answer 

 a question, and each question 

 ultimately leads to a management 

 decision. 



The success of the DAMOS effort 

 recently has been recognized by the 

 National Academy of Science (National 

 Research Council, 1990). An important 

 attribute of a responsive and evolving 

 program is that it requires periodic 

 scrutiny for technical and managerial 

 improvement. The tiered monitoring 

 protocol presented in the pages to 

 follow is the product of both internal 

 and external technical critique and 



The questions that helped structure 

 the tiered monitoring protocol are: 



• What are the central questions 

 and/or null hypotheses? 



• What are the sources of uncertainty 

 in our existing knowledge? 



• What are the most efficient data 

 gathering methods to address these 



