Trends indicate that hundreds of thousands more people will migrate to these coastal areas in the decades to come. Rivers and estuaries along the coasts have, for many years, shown signs of environmental degradation. Trends indicate that these lands and waters will be under more intense stress in the future. Initiating management activities requires collecting and organizing information about the resources present and their use in coastal areas. It also does not extend into either Canada or Mexico and does not contain any official international boundaries.
All international boundaries shown are approximations.
These spatial areas were derived from six building blocks , including a set of approximately 700 U.S. Geological Survey hydrologic cataloging units, a shoreline for the oceanic coasts, a shoreline for the Great Lakes, and a set of lines representing the United States' open-ocean boundary. The Colorado River, which drains into the Golfo de California, the St. John River, which drains from upstate Maine into Canada, the Lake Champlain drainage in New York, and the Red River of the North, which drains from North Dakota and Minnesota into Canada, are not included in the Framework. An Estuarine Drainage Area is that component of an estuary's entire watershed that empties directly into the estuary and is affected by tides. EDAs may be composed of a portion of a single hydrologic unit, an entire hydrologic unit, more than one hydrologic unit, or several complete hydrologic units and portions or several adjacent hydrologic units. Every EDA has both a land and water component, with the land component comprised of a mainland component and, for certain EDAs, an island component.