saline pan

ENVO:00000279 ·resolve ·TERRESTRIAL ·EXACT REVIEWED

A flat expanse of ground covered with salt and other minerals, usually shining white under the sun. A salt pan is formed where water pools. A saline pan would be a lake or a pond if it were located in a climate where the rate of water evaporation were not faster than the rate of water precipitation, i.e., if it were not in a desert. If the water is unable to drain into the ground, it remains on the surface until it evaporates, leaving behind whatever minerals were dissolved. Over thousands of years, the minerals (usually salts) accumulate on the surface. — ENVO

Source attestations

Each upstream vocabulary's own account of this habitat. Assertion counts are per-source units and are not comparable across sources — GOLD counts organisms, BacDive strains, PREGO taxa.

What each upstream vocabulary says about this habitat
Source	Label / path	Assertions	Unit
GOLD	Environmental > Terrestrial > Desert > Salt pan/flat 2 GOLD ecosystem node ids share this path; first shown. See data/raw/gold_ecosystem_paths.tsv.	—
GOLD	Environmental > Aquatic > Non-marine Saline and Alkaline > Hypersaline > Salt flat/Salt pan	6	ORGANISM
GOLD	Environmental > Terrestrial > Soil > Salt flat/Salt pan 2 GOLD ecosystem node ids share this path; first shown. See data/raw/gold_ecosystem_paths.tsv.	19	ORGANISM

Broader habitats

soil ENVO:00001998
dry lake bed ENVO:01000296
hypersaline water environment ENVO:01001043
desert ENVO:01001357

Also called

SALT PAN — ENVO
Salt flat/Salt pan — GOLD
Salt pan/flat — GOLD
salt area — ENVO
salt flat — ENVO
salt pan — ENVO

Curation

What a curator decided about this record, and why. A record built from several source concepts can carry one decision per concept.

GROUND 2026-08-12 · claude-opus-5
Grounded to ENVO:00000279 'saline pan' (EXACT). Slash alternative; saline pan is the ENVO label for a salt flat. Path: Environmental > Terrestrial > Soil > Salt flat/Salt pan (source concept habitatmech:GOLD.1926a8a777)
GROUND 2026-08-12 · claude-opus-5
Grounded to ENVO:00000279 'saline pan' (EXACT). Slash alternative naming one thing; grounded to the head term. Pulled out of the class-level sweep, whose note wrongly claimed no term matched. Label: 'Salt pan/flat'. (source concept habitatmech:GOLD.33fed7851a)
GROUND 2026-08-12 · claude-opus-5
Grounded to ENVO:00000279 'saline pan' (EXACT). Slash alternative; saline pan is the ENVO label for a salt flat. Path: Environmental > Aquatic > Non-marine Saline and Alkaline > Hypersaline (source concept habitatmech:GOLD.ef06deeb18)

Provenance

Generated by scripts/seed_from_sources.py from the committed inventories in data/raw/. View the record.