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Estuarine use conflicts and damages involve activities and effects 

 concerning both land and water. 



Many of the wastes which damage the estuarine environment orig- 

 inate from cities, industries, and other activities on the land, and 

 control of the wastes from such sources is essential to effective manage- 

 ment. Shoreline development limits access to estuarine areas as well as 

 modifying some parts of the estuarine environment. 



An estuarine management unit, therefore, should consist not only of 

 the estuarine waters, bottoms, and associated marshlands ; but it should 

 also include all of the shoreline surrounding the estuarine waters them- 

 selves and as much of the adjoining land as is necessary to regulate 

 the discharge of wastes into estuarine waters. 



Effective control of water quality is one key to effective technical 

 management, and one essential requirement in accomplishing this is 

 the ability to monitor water quality constantly and consistently. While 

 the details of water quality monitoring are based on needs within 

 individual estuarine systems, it is necessary that management unit 

 boundaries be chosen so that the managing authority can measure 

 both the quality and quantity of water entering and leaving the man- 

 agement unit. This is essential both to give warning of any incoming 

 water quality degradation and to safeguard other estuarine 

 environments by warning of any outgoing water quality degradation. 



The size of the estuarine management unit is in itself a highly im- 

 portant factor in the technical managment of estuarine systems. In a 

 very small management unit it may be impossible to accommodate more 

 than one use, thus making futile efforts to resolve use conflicts and 

 achieve multiple use. For example, the maintenance of a commercial 

 oyster fishery in the midst of a dredged navigation channel might offer 

 the same problems in achieving multiple use as would the maintenance 

 of a commercial chicken ranch in the middle of Kennedy International 

 Airport. Conversely, in very large, highly developed, management 

 units it becomes difficult to deal with individual problems in sufficient 

 detail to control use conflicts effectively. 



The boundaries of viable estuarine management units are generally 

 governed by social, economic, and political factors rather than the 

 sizes of the estuarine systems they include. Tlius, the capability of 

 technical management to resolve use conflicts in some management 

 units may be severely limited by external factors and it maj^ therefore 

 be necessary to forego some uses because of the small size of the 

 estuarine resource available for use. 



RESOLUTION OF PROHIBITrVE USE CONFLICTS 



Those uses which exclude other uses generally involve modification 

 of the shoreline, marshes, or bottoms by dredging, filling, or the build- 

 ing of a permanent structure. Such activities may not only immediately 

 affect the estuarine morphology and habitat, but they may also cause 

 widespread, long-range changes in the ecosystem. 



The evaluation of the effects of prohibitive uses on the estuarine 

 environment is probably the most difficult problem currently facing 

 technical management. The immediate and obvious effects of the 

 habitat loss associated with such uses can be measured and described 

 fairly easily, but the ultimate results of the modification of water 



