Pond biodiversity and habitat loss in the UK

By P. Wood, M. Greenwood, M. Agnew. 2003

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ponds are common landscape features but have been poorly studied compared to other freshwater habitats in the UK, despite their high frequency of occurrence. In the last century, many ponds have been lost and those that remain face increasing pressure due to agricultural land drainage, pollution and urban development. However, ponds provide important habitats for diverse floral and faunal communities, including a number of rare taxa of conservation interest. This paper examines the biodiversity and wider environmental value of ponds, with particular reference to the aquatic invertebrate and amphibian communities they support, and the adverse impact of anthropogenic activity on their aquatic habitats.

Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ecc1e992871b5a2f018816e4751a9a2827c37814

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In Ecology

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Odonata, Amphibia and Environmental Characteristics in Motorway Stormwater Retention Ponds (Southern France) (2005, background): “Small ecosystems such as ponds are little studied and a lack of knowledge occurs in their community composition and structure or even their ecological role in the landscape matrix (Wood & Barker, 2000; Wood et al., 2003; Williams et al., 2004), particularly for motorway ponds.”
Passive acoustic monitoring as a potential tool to survey animal and ecosystem processes in freshwater environments (2019, background): “These activities result in direct loss, fragmentation (Wood et al., 2003) and quality alteration of habitats (e.g. pollution or desiccation), such that species have declined at a much higher rate in freshwater systems (83”
Amphibian decline, pond loss and reduced population connectivity under agricultural intensification over a 38 year period (2017, result): “This is higher than in most other areas studied (e.g. Wood et al. 2003) but lower than what we observed in western France (Visser et al. 2017).”
Conservation of newt guilds in an agricultural landscape of Belgium: the importance of aquatic and terrestrial habitats (2008, background): “In the past century, 75% of ponds have been lost in Great Britain, with some areas losing up to 95% of ponds (Wood et al. , 2003).”