Ten Sites, ranging from offshore of Rockland, Maine to Stamford, Connecticut (map), have received most of the attention under DAMOS, which currently expends about $500,000 to $750,000 a year. DAMOS, has come to be recognized as one of the most advanced and comprehensive monitoring efforts of its kind, and has been cited in national scientific publications. For example, a 1990 National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences report, Managing Troubled Waters: The Role of Marine Environmental Monitoring, cited DAMOS as "an outstanding example [of a monitoring program] in which the development of clear objectives helped translate monitoring data into information that supported management actions ...[DAMOS incorporates] a technical design that meets management needs."

Using state-of-the-art equipment, the system employs bathymetric surveys, side scan sonar, underwater photography, divers, sediment analyses, sediment profile photography, biological analyses, and submersible vessels, among other techniques. These approaches are used in a multi-tiered monitoring plan, where techniques in the higher tiers are used only when results from the lower tiers indicate a need for more detailed monitoring. Nationally recognized scientists from Yale, the University of Rhode Island, the University of Connecticut, the University of Maine, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the Florida Institute of Technology have actively participated in the program.

Its physical, chemical, and biological measurements allow us to detect short and long-term changes at these disposal sites: information that is invaluable in our daily permitting and management decisions concerning whether, where, and how dredged material should be deposited in marine waters.

Although the program's findings are somewhat site-specific, the overall results to date have shown that dredged material deposited in properly located ocean disposal sites will remain where it is deposited and will have no significant effect on nearby marine resources. DAMOS results are published and available in a series of technical reports that are comprehensively indexed. For more in-depth information see the Dredged Material Management Program Brochure published and available in a series of technical reports that are comprehensively indexed.