Twenty years ago, estuarine shoreline protection was relegated to hardening techniques or none at all. Many private property owners did not want to riprap or bulkhead their estuarine beaches, preferring the natural intertidal zone. As shoreline erosion increased due to ship traffic, boat wakes, sea level rise, and bulkheads, they resorted to their only option, a hardened shoreline. 
Historically, residents in coastal Alabama went to the beach along Mobile Bay. A touch point to the area's most significant resource is important, but little access remains. Regulatory burdens drive the private property owner to cheaper hardening alternatives, damaging from both an ecological and cultural perspective. 
Today, there are more shoreline protection options. These maintain the integrity and attributes of a natural shoreline. For private property owners, burdens still exist for design options such as pocket beaches along estuarine intertidal areas. 
This presentation we will address three regulatory burdens: reclamation, federal and state design requirements, and fees. We will present the problem and workable management solutions to these shoreline protection hurdles. 

Natural shorelines provide ecosystem services that are integral to maintaining healthy and resilient coastal ecosystems and communities. However, anthropogenic and environmental stressors are reducing the extent of natural shorelines and, thus, their capacity to provide critical ecosystem services. Small-scale private property owners own an overwhelming majority of waterfront property in coastal Mississippi and Alabama. Therefore, environmentally-focused management of private shorelines can provide large-scale benefits. Unfortunately, the most common shoreline management strategies for private property owners are hardened structures (e.g., bulkheads and seawalls) that are known to impair coastal ecosystems. An alternative to hardened shorelines is living shorelines, which are a collection of shoreline stabilization techniques that incorporate natural materials such as native shoreline plants. To promote living shorelines with private property owners, the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Living Shorelines Program and its partners began producing guidance documents, offering technical assistance, and conducting trainings for private property owners and contractors. Throughout these interactions, property owners and contractors have expressed their potential barriers to living shoreline adoption and needs (living shoreline research, communication, and training). In this presentation, we will discuss the status of addressing those barriers and needs as well as introduce some new living shoreline assistance programs in Mississippi and Alabama.