About the Estuary

The New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary includes the waters of New York Harbor and the tidally influenced portions of all rivers and streams that empty into the Harbor. Here are some maps to help you better visaulize our watershed:



The Bight is the ocean area extending approximately 100 miles offshore from the Sandy Hook-Rockaway Point Transect to the Continental Slope. Almost 240 miles of sandy shoreline, extending from Cape May, New Jersey, to Montauk Point, Long Island, form its landward border. There are several back bays that are located behind the barrier beaches outside the core area of the Harbor. Some of the larger back bays adjacent to the Bight are the Great South Bay, Shinnecock Bay, and Moriches Bay in New York, and Barnegat Bay, Great Bay, Great Egg Harbor, and Little Egg Harbor in New Jersey.

 

 

The shaded area in the map to the right is considered the "core area" because it is generally the most degraded. --  It extends from the tidal waters of the Hudson-Raritan Estuary from Piermont Marsh in New York State to an imaginary line (the Sandy Hook-Rockaway Point Transect) connecting Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and Rockaway Point, New York, at the mouth of the Harbor. This core area includes the bi-state waters of the Hudson River, Upper and Lower Bays, Arthur Kill, Kill van Kull, and Raritan Bay. In New York, the area includes the East and Harlem Rivers and Jamaica Bay, and in New Jersey it includes the Hackensack, Passaic, Raritan, Shrewsbury, Navesink, and Rahway Rivers, and Newark and Sandy Hook Bays.

 

 

 

 

Although the focus of the HEP management plan is on the Harbor and Bight, the drainage basin or watershed of the Estuary encompasses about 16,300 square miles, including much of eastern New York, northern New Jersey, and small parts of western Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. The quality of the Estuary’s waters is affected not only by activities occurring directly in the Harbor and Bight but also by industrial, agricultural, land use, and other individual practices throughout this larger watershed. As rainwater moves over the land in the watershed, it carries with it many potential pollutants that eventually end up in the Estuary – oil dumped down storm drains, pesticides from farms, lawn fertilizers, oil and gasoline from highway runoff, sewage from failed septic tanks, and sediment from construction projects.

New York/New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program • 290 Broadway, 24th Floor • New York, NY 10007-1866
Phone: 212-637-3816 • Fax: 212-637-3889 • E-mail: info@harborestuary.org