Scope of Study

This study will explore boat traffic properties and their implications for monitoring at two levels of generalization: local neighborhoods (or trafficsheds), and at a regional scale of a relatively enclosed open bay system.

  A trafficshed is a term that was introduced by Antonini and Box (1996) to describe a group of boats and facilities that share an entrance channel or channels with which they may access the outside world (see figure 1.7 on page ). The name comes from the analogy of such systems with a watershed, where the water over a defined area is constrained to a single outlet. A trafficshed is a common source area for the boats that are resident within it.

  

Figure 1.7: An example of a trafficshed. Boats that start from a facility (private dock, marina, boat ramp, etc.), and follow the paths along the directions of the arrows to the outlet. All the boats in this trafficshed are obliged to pass through the outlet to reach the open bay. The dark shading is land, and the lighter shading is shallow seagrass areas.

An open bay boating environment is the next level of complexity up from a trafficshed. A bay's traffic system may contain several trafficshed source areas, boating facilities, well-defined pathways, open areas without defined pathways, and any number of destinations depending on the nature of the boat traffic that exists in the system. Source areas can be individual facilities, clusters of facilities (trafficsheds), marinas, or inlets which connect the open bay to neighboring, adjacent traffic areas.