Littoral Zone

Littoral Zone:

 The shallow shoreward region of a freshwater body, just beyond the breaker zone, where light penetrates to the bottom sediments, giving rise to a zone that is colonized by rooted plants called helophytes; a region of a lake or pond where the water is
less than 6 meters deep; in oceanography, the line extending from the high-water line to about 200 meters; also called the intertidal zone where submersion of tides is a normal event. The near-surface open water surrounded by the littoral zone is the limnetic
zone, which gets ample light and is dominated by plankton. The littoral system is divided into a eulittoral (lower, middle, and upper) zone and a sublittoral (subtidal or supratidal) zone, the zone exposed to air only at its upper limit by the lowest spring tides. They are separated at a depth of about 50 meters. The term is
also frequently used interchangeably with intertidal zone.