What does this data reference mean?

Many people, including me, expressed support for making implicit save obsolescent and eventually deleting it from Fortran, in the thread Fortran function remembers values (newbie help), and I would not advise people to write code that could be declared obsolescent in the future. Since

REAL, SAVE :: thisvar=1.

is much less likely to be removed from Fortran, I suggest using that instead.