Glossary

A-C

Abandoned Quarries
Quarry is defined as "An open or surface working or excavation for the extraction of stone, ore, coal, gravel or minerals". In such pits water accumulates after being abandoned.

Aquaculture ponds
Aquaculture is defined as "The breeding and rearing of fresh-water or marine fish in captivity. Fish farming or ranching". The water bodies used for the above are called aquaculture ponds

Ash pond/Cooling pond
The water body created for discharging effluents in the industry, especially in thermal power plants. Cooling pond - An artificial lake used for the natural cooling of condenser-cooling water serving a conventional power station.

Backwater
A creek, arm of the sea or series of connected lagoons, usually parallel to the coast, separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land but communicating with it through barred outlets.

Bay
A large estuary with a relatively high degree of flushing.

Coral reef
Consolidated living colonies of microscopic organisms found in the warm tropical waters. The term coral reef, or organic reef is applied to the rock-like reefs built-up of living things, principally corals. They consist of accumulations of calcareous deposits of corals and coralline algae with the intervening space connected with sand, which consists largely of shells of foraminifers. Present reefs are living associates growing on this accumulation of past.

Creek
A notable physiographic feature of salt marshes, especially low marshes, in the development of tidal creeks in the marsh itself. These creeks develop, as do rivers "with minor irregularities sooner or later causing the water to be deflected into definite channels".    Top

D-F

Estuary
A confined coastal water body with an open connection to sea and a measurable quantity of salt in its water. At and near the region where the fresh water from the land meets the salt water of the sea, a distinctive aquatic environment occurs, the estuary. The estuary is an ecotone - a rather complex buffer zone, sharing some characteristics of both types of aquatic ecosystems, but identical to neither.  Top

G-I



J-L

Lagoons
These are coastal bodies of water, party separated from the sea by barrier beaches or bass of marine origin. As a rule, lagoons are elongate and lie parallel to the shoreline. They are usually characteristic of, but not restricted to, shores of emergence. Lagoons are generally shallower and more saline than typical estuaries.   Top

M-O

Mangrove
The mangrove swamp- is an association of halophytic trees, shrubs, and other plants growing in brackish to saline tidal waters of tropical and subtropical coastlines.

Marsh
A frequently or continually inundated wetland characterized by emergent herbaceous vegetation adapted to saturated soil conditions. In European terminology a marsh has a mineral soil substrate and does not accumulate peat

Ox-bow lakes/Cut-off meanders
A meandering stream may erode the outside shores of its broad bends, and in time the loops may become cut-off, leaving basins. The resulting shallow crescent-shaped lakes are called ox-bow lakes.   Top

P-R

Playas
Term used in South-West United States for marsh-like ponds similar to potholes but with different geologic origin.

Reservoir
A pond or lake built for the storage of water, usually by the construction of dam across a river.

Rocky Coast
Beach consisting of rocky material.   Top

S-U

Salt Marsh/Marsh Vegetation
Natural or semi natural halophytic grassland and dwarf brushwood on the alluvial sediments bordering saline water bodies whose water level fluctuates either tidally or non-tidally.

Salt pans
An undrained usually small and shallow rectangular, man-made depression or hollow in which saline water accumulates and evaporates leaving a salt deposit.

Sand/Beach
Beach is an unvegetated part of the shoreline formed of loose material; usually sand that extends from the upper berm (a ridge or ridges on the back shore of the beach, formed by the deposit of the material by wave action, that marks the upper limit of the ordinary high tides and wave ash) to low water mark.

Swamp
Wetland dominated by trees or shrubs (U.S. Definition). In Europe, a forested fen, (a peat accumulating wetland that has no significant inflows or outflows and supports acidophilic mosses, particularly Spahgnum) could be called a swamp. In some areas reed grass - dominated wetlands also called swamps.

Tanks
A term used in Sri Lanka and drier parts of the Peninsular India for artificial pond, pool or lake formed by building a mud wall across the valley of a small stream to retain the monsoon.

Tidal flat/mud flat
Most unvegetated areas that are alternately exposed and inundated by the falling and rising of the tide. They may be mudflats or sand flats depending on the coarseness of the material of which they are made.   Top

V-X

Waterlogged
Man-made activities like canals induce waterlogging in adjacent areas due to seepage.

Waterlogged (seasonal)
Said of an area in which water stands near, at, or above the land surface, so that the roots of all plants except hydrophytes are drowned and the plants die.   Top

Y-Z