resulting from the 1985 DAMOS Public 

 Symposium (SAIC, 1986) that the 

 DAMOS program suffered from a lack 

 of clearly-defined, testable hypotheses. 



Despite the amount of effort spent 

 by the Corps studying the 

 environmental effects of dredging (e.g., 

 Engler et al„ 1990) and the past 13 

 years of data gathered under the 

 DAMOS program, there is still a need 

 for monitoring the environmental 

 effects of open-water dredged material 

 disposal to better understand and 

 quantify ecosystem response to the 

 disposal activity. If accurate and 

 reliable predictions about the 

 environmental effects of dredged 

 material disposal could be made, there 

 would be no need for the DAMOS 

 program or monitoring of any sort. 

 However, instead of continuing the 

 "retrospective 1 ' monitoring (sensu 

 Hartung, 1984) which has been done 

 in the past, the intent of this 

 document is to outline a tiered 

 monitoring/management structure 

 which is "prospective" in nature. 

 While retrospective monitoring 

 programs do not determine the 

 magnitude and type of impacts until 

 after data are collected and 

 interpreted, a prospective monitoring 

 program is designed to test site 

 conditions against a previously stated 

 outcome or standards (Moriarty, 1983). 

 However, as will be brought out in the 

 sections to follow, because of the 

 limitations of our knowledge of 

 ecosystem function and the 

 unexpected results which can occur 

 from the interaction of human 

 activities with natural ecological 

 processes, the predicted "outcomes" are 

 often times a best guess. If one 



defines an experiment as "an action 

 whose outcome we cannot predict 

 precisely or specify beforehand" (i.e., 

 the disposal of dredged material in the 

 natural system), then an alternative 

 frame of reference is to view 

 monitoring as a feedback mechanism 

 providing data about the outcome of 

 experiments (Bernstein and Zalinski, 

 1986). This admission of fallibility 

 does not detract from the underlying 

 structure or basic value of the 

 monitoring program; it merely 

 requires letting go of the illusion of 

 certainty (Holling, 1978). 



This document is the first 

 organized attempt by the program to 

 depart from the cyclical repetition of 

 past mistakes. The remainder of this 

 document will present the three 

 hierarchical management and 

 monitoring strategies developed 

 during the past TAG sessions and 

 provide an explanation for the 

 background and rationale of each 

 element in these plans. The current 

 regulations regarding ocean disposal of 

 dredged material, due to their vague 

 language, provide a wide latitude to 

 each individual Corps district to 

 interpret what exactly are 

 "unreasonable degradation" or 

 "unacceptable adverse effects". 

 However, it is precisely this lack of 

 clear definition in the regulations that 

 have caused most dredged material 

 monitoring programs to appear in 

 hindsight as a haphazard collection of 

 data inventories with no clear purpose 

 in mind; as Green (1979) stated so 

 eloquently in his landmark textbook, 

 "Your results will be as coherent and 

 as comprehensible as your initial 

 conception of the problem." Because 



An Integrated, Tiered Approach to Monitoring and Management of Dredged Material Disposal Sites 



