In the Southeast Region, the NOAA Fisheries
Service Habitat Program is administered by the Habitat Conservation
Division (HCD). The HCD focuses it's efforts on conserving
coastal habitats in the eight coastal states from North Carolina
to Texas, and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The HCD
has branch offices in Texas, Louisiana, North and South Carolina
and Florida. The bulk of the workload relates to direct involvement
with the wetland and civil works programs of the U. S. Army Corps
of Engineers where we review proposals to alter coastal wetlands.
In the Southeast Region, we review more than 50 percent (around
4,000 per year) of all permit requests and federal projects handled
nationwide by NOAA Fisheries Service.
Most of this workload involves review of individual proposals
to alter wetlands by private and public interests. The coastal
zone along the southeastern mainland of the U.S. includes more
than 2,799 miles of coastline, 29,900 miles of tidal shoreline
and 300 estuarine systems. The estuaries in the southeast contain
about 17.2 million acres of marsh and other estuarine habitat and
5.1 million acres of intertidal areas. These wetlands comprise
about 83 percent of the coastal wetlands in the coterminous United
States. The Southeast Region contains most of the nation's mangrove
swamps and seagrasses.
Conserving coastal habitats is important in that approximately
98 percent of all Gulf of Mexico and 94 percent of all southeast
Atlantic commercial landings are dependent upon coastal habitats.
These resources provide significant economic and social benefits.
In addition to food production, wetlands and coastal habitats provide
many other useful benefits such as storm protection, flood prevention,
erosion protection, aesthetics, waterfowl and furbearer production,
recreation, and other benefits. These values, according to some
estimates, can be as high as $82 thousand per acre per year.
