U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Engineer Research and Development Center

The United States is a party to the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping Wastes and Other Matter (London Convention 1972, LC). This is an agreement to control deliberate disposal at sea of wastes or other matter, including dredged material, from a variety of platforms. The LC entered into force in 1975 and requires the parties to report every year on the amount and location of materials disposed at sea. The first reporting year was 1976. In 1972, the United States Congress enacted the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act (MPRSA). The MPRSA regulates the disposal at sea of all materials that would adversely affect human health, welfare or amenities, or the marine environment, ecological systems or economic potentialities. The MPRSA implements the requirements of the LC and is the legislative authority regulating the disposal of dredged material into ocean waters, including the territorial sea. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) collaborates with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) to prepare an annual ocean disposal report to fulfill the LC obligation. The ODMDS database is a publicly available database providing information about the disposal history of dredged material at ocean sites in the United States and its territories as well as ocean site characteristics for over 100 ocean sites.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has generated and used bioaccumulation data to guide regulatory decisions regarding the management of dredged sediment for over 40 years.

Prior to the 1990s, reliance on bioaccumulation information was hampered by an insufficient number of published bioaccumulation data and dispersed distribution of this information in the literature. Before bioaccumulation information can be put to use in a regulatory program, an accessible, centralized repository for this type of data is needed. In recognition of this fact, the USACE developed the Environmental Residue-Effects Database (ERED) and the Biota-Sediment Accumulation Factor Database (BSAF) in the 1990s with a focus on providing information for contaminants commonly encountered during evaluation of dredged sediment. Users can query the online databases by specifying a number of potential criteria or download the complete ERED or BSAF data set as a spreadsheet.

The ERED and BSAF is designed to support the USACE dredging mission by providing data to help interpret the results of bioaccumulation tests which are conducted for dredged sediments proposed for disposal at aquatic sites. The ERED presents data where tissue contaminant concentrations and resulting effects have been measured in the same organism (i.e., residue-effects data). The BSAF is the ratio of the lipid-normalized concentration of a hydrophobic organic chemical (HOC) in an organism to the organic carbon-normalized concentration of the HOC in the sediment the organism was exposed to. The resulting BSAF number allows for an interpretation of the bioaccumulation of a chemical by an organism as a result of uptake from the environment.

This database is a collection of “gray” literature, reports from U.S. government agencies, and reports from contractors. The literature covers a diverse range of topics related to environmental effects of dredging and dredged material disposal projects. The database focuses on broad topics such as beneficial uses of dredged material, contaminated sediments, and effects of sediment resuspension and sedimentation on aquatic organisms and their habitats.

Explore the many millions of dollars USACE spends to protect threatened and endangered (T&E) species each year. Since 2005 USACE has utilized an online database to fulfill the annual Endangered Species Act (ESA) required reporting of all T&E species costs incurred by federal agencies. Feel free to utilize these data for budget planning, strategic species management, and to inform basic T&E species cost questions across the Corps.

ERDC-CHL, through the Dredging Innovations Group (DIG), has extracted the text of the Annual Report of the Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army, on Civil Works Activities from 1874 through 2000 using optical character recognition technology. This website allows visitors to download the extracted text as a collection of 106 documents in text format. In addition, a rule-based natural language processing technique was used to extract a structured set of numeric data pertaining to dredging activity from the reports ranging from 1908 to 2000. Visitors can download removal, placement, and operation data tables, as well as a report documenting the effort, and GATE software files used on the corpus of text data.