Land-use types and related intensities are often associated with pressures and disturbances on estuarine environmental values and ecosystem services provided by water. Although with varied legal frameworks across countries, broadly, spatial planning has been expected to contribute to the protection of environmentally sensitive areas, such as estuaries. Among the various planning tools are the plan's land-use control rules. This article studies the incorporation of water-related terms in the regulations of municipal master plans to assess if land-use rules established on estuarine areas are significantly different from others, such as in upstream areas. It does so by developing a content analysis of a set of plans' regulations located in estuarine and upstream areas of two river basins of Mainland Portugal. The results show greater incorporation of water-related terms in plans' regulations located in estuarine areas. Moreover, they show a greater diversity of water-related topics, types, and focus of rules on estuarine areas, whereas on upstream areas the regulatory approaches look poorer. Although the incorporation of water-related terms is globally higher in younger plans, and to a certain extent, in more artificialized and dense territories, a clear distinctiveness of water-related concerns in land-use regulations of municipal plans on estuarine areas remains visible. Surprisingly, the results bring to the fore fragilities of land-use regulations on upstream areas worthy of attention in future studies. The methodology used for content analysis disclosed a valuable path for future research as it is easily expandable to take into consideration different land-uses or to be applied to different regions, to further refine if the distinctive features are explicitly related with estuarine areas or with other types of water problems.

土地利用类型和相关强度通常与对河口环境价值和水提供的生态系统服务的压力和干扰有关。尽管各国法律框架各不相同，但总的来说，空间规划已被期望有助于保护诸如河口等对环境敏感的地区。各种计划工具中包括计划的土地使用控制规则。本文研究了与水有关的术语在市政总体规划法规中的纳入，以评估在河口地区建立的土地使用规则是否与其他规则（例如上游地区）显着不同。为此，它对位于葡萄牙大陆两个河流域的河口和上游地区的一系列计划法规进行了内容分析。结果表明，与水有关的术语在河口地区的计划法规中纳入了更多内容。此外，它们显示出与水有关的主题，类型和规则重点在河口地区的多样性更大，而在上游地区，监管方法则较差。尽管在较年轻的计划中，与水有关的术语在全球范围内纳入程度更高，在一定程度上，在更加人为化和密集的地区，与水有关的关注在河口地区市政计划的土地使用法规中仍具有明显的区别。令人惊讶的是，结果使上游地区土地利用法规的脆弱性成为未来研究中值得关注的问题。