 Dayton is the only person to win both the George Mercer Award (1974) and the WS Cooper Award (2000) from the Ecological Society of America.In 2002. he received the Scientific Diving Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Underwater Sciences; in 2004 he was honored with the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award from the American Society of Naturalists, and in 2006 was the first recipient of the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology, awarded by a jury of scientists representing Catalonia, the European Union, and the international ecology community.Dayton has been director of The Ocean Conservancy and the National Research Council Panel on Marine Protected Areas.