Abstract:

In recent years, the development and studies of coastal zone are becoming more and more active. The confusion of related terms has hindered the communication, especially hindered the interdisciplinary communication. In order to promote the terms’ unification in different disciplines, we analyzed four sets confused terms, such as “littoral/shore/coast/beach”, “coastal zone/littoral zone”, “seaboard wetland/coastal wetland/littoral wetland/aquatic marginal wetland”, “biogenic coast/ organic reef coast/ coral reef coast”, and then discriminated and redefined them.

Key words: coastline, intertidal zone, supratidal zone, subtidal zone, mangrove coast