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Merritt Island NWR is located due east of Titusville. It is on Merritt Island, a peninsula in Brevard County, Florida, and occupies 570 km˛ (140,000 acres). To the north, it borders on the Canaveral National Seashore; to the south, it borders on the Kennedy Space Center (with which it also shares some history), which in turn abuts Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Since public access to all these areas is controlled in various ways, the refuge is part of very substantial area of relatively undisturbed wildlife habitat.
The land occupied by the NWR was acquired by NASA in the early 1960s for the development of the Space Center but not required for operational purposes. Until that time there had been little development in the area because of the high numbers of salt marsh mosquitoes. Public access is normally permitted, and several state highways run across the refuge; however the public can be excluded if necessary for NASA's purposes (for example, this is currently done in the days before or of a space shuttle launch or landing).
The refuge provides a range of habitats, from saltwater estuariesAn estuary is a semi-enclosed coastal body of water which has a free connection with the open sea and within which sea water mixes with fresh water. The key feature of an estuary is that it is an interface between sea water and fresh water and there is an and freshwater impoundments and marshes, to duneAlternate meanings: Dune (novel), Dune (movie), Dune (TV miniseries), Dune (music) or Dune (computer game In physical geography, a dune is a hill of sand built by eolian ( wind-related) processes. Bare dunes are subject to shifting location and size baseds, hardwoodBeech is a typical temperate zone hardwood The term hardwood designates wood from angiosperm trees. Hardwood contrasts with softwood, which comes from gymnosperm ( coniferous) trees. They are in general of higher density and hardness, but there is conside hammockThis article deals with the most common use of the word hammock a sling for sleeping or resting in. Particularly in the southern United States, a hammock can also mean a piece of thickly wooded land, usually covered with bushes and vines. The hammock is as, and scrubScrub has a number of meanings: to rub a surface hard, especially with a brush. low lying vegetation or an area containing this vegetation. This term is commonly used in New Zealand for the early stages of a regenerating forest ( bush), sub-alpine scrub o. It is therefore rich in speciesThis article discusses biological species. Also see combinatorial species for the mathematical meaning of the term. Species is also a movie by Roger Donaldson. In English "species" is both singular and plural. The word " specie" is unrelated and is used t, and over 1000 species of plants, 117 species of fishAtlantic herring, Clupea harengus one of the most abundant species in the world Photo A fish is a poikilothermic (cold-blooded) water-dwelling vertebrate with gills. There are over 27,000 species of fish, making them the most diverse group of vertebrates., 68 amphibians and reptiles, 330 birds and 31 mammal species are listed. 21 of these species are listed as endangered either by the state of Florida or by the US federal government. The following are some of the more important species using the refuge; most of them nest there: