Florida's economic well-being is inextricably linked to its coastal and marine resources. Coastal communities face a difficult, yet critical management challenge: how to sustain economic viability while maintaining and restoring the environmental integrity of coastal resources.

     This task is complicated by rapid population growth, a concurrent increase in recreational boating and other water-related activity, declining natural environments, and coastal and marine resources that are, in many cases, overburdened. The diverse and often competing uses of coastal resources have increased the number and intensity of user conflicts. For instance, the decline in public waterway access to recreational boaters, major contributors to Florida's economy, is a particularly contentious issue.

     A compelling need exists to foster community development and resource management strategies that are compatible, sustainable, and equitable. If coastal communities are to achieve sustainability, all stakeholders, including users, policy makers, regulators, and resource managers, need new methods and information sources with which to address pressing economic and environmental issues.

     Florida Sea Grant, with its partners, aims to achieve an acceptable balance among environmental sustainability, recreational small-craft use, and growth in coastal communities through science-based research and extension. An operating principle is that self-regulation is an effective management framework to reduce regulatory costs, keep boating and its support industries economically productive, and reduce environmental impacts from boating.

     Products and services have evolved within this science-based management framework to address boating-environmental issues that benefit regulators, agencies, industries and citizens. They include: economic and environmental assessments of the boating sector; Geographical Information System (GIS) procedures for ecological planning; prioritization systems for evaluating storm damage to vessels; boat traffic monitoring schemes; regional recreational boating characterizations, boat channel maintenance and spoil management planning; marine land and water use site planning; methods of shallow-water bathymetric surveying for charting recreational boating waterways and prioritizing waterway management; and the development of strategic plans for inland navigation districts.