thalassic and athalassic qualities

[kaiiam]

Cross link to #672.

From the discussion in #775, I've working on the JGI GOLD/EBI terms, I've run into new terms Athalassic (away from the sea) and Thalassic (by the sea), which are used in the annotation of saline lakes and lagoons respectively.

My understanding of the thalassic athalassic attributes is that they describe whether or not a water body is marine. Thus I propose to make them into ENVO quality terms as subclasses of physical quality sister classes to sea state.

[pbuttigieg]

I think that works - I think they're specific enough to ENVO's domain that PATO wouldn't really need to host them. We can port them later if needed, but the axiomatisation would be better in ENVO.

Are there any substantive guidelines on what makes something "near the sea" enough to be thalassic?

[pbuttigieg]

@kaiiam
Do you have a good reference for definitions?

Merriam-Webster has a definition of thalassic that references "inland seas".

That seems more specific than what you're describing

[pbuttigieg]

Also, consider:

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/thalassic
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/thalassic
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thalassic

[kaiiam]

For athalassic, from this paper we get:

The lakes in which these formations were deposited are athalassic (i.e. not marine relicts)

From the eunis habitats page we have the definition:

Athalassic (inland), permanent or temporary, brackish, saline or hypersaline waterbodies and their associated animal, charophyte, green algal or lower algal pelagic and benthic communities. The macrophytic, euhydrophytic based communities that colonize them are separately listed (unit C1.52), the macrophytic amphibious communities and the terrestrial communities that may develop during dry phases or in drying and dried portions as units of D6.1or E6, fringing belts or island rafts of rooted or floating tall emergent vegetation as units C3.2112 or D6.2.