Porous, resilient salt marsh soils and grasses absorb flood waters and dissipate storm surges. Salt marsh dominated estuaries provide natural buffers between the land and the ocean. They protect upland organisms as well as billions of dollars of human real estate. Estuaries are crucial transition zones between land and water that provide an environment for lessons in biology, geology, chemistry, physics, history, and social issues. Humans have long been attracted to estuaries.
Indian middens consisting of shellfish and fish bones are reminders of how ancient cultures lived.
Since Colonial times we have used estuaries and their connecting network of rivers for transporting agricultural goods for manufacturing and trade. Not only do commercially important fish and shellfish spawn, nurse, or feed in estuaries, estuaries also feed our hearts and minds. Scientists and students, poets and painters, bird watchers and canoeists - all are inspired by the beauty and diversity found in an estuary. Human activity also seriously threatens the vulnerable ecosystems found in the estuaries. Long considered to be wastelands, estuaries have had their channels dredged, marshes and tidal flats filled, waters polluted, and shorelines reconstructed to accommodate our housing, transportation, and agriculture needs.