Societal challenges :
- For adaptation to climate changes : soil erosion mitigation and flood prevention.
- For biodiversity : facilitating the recovery of biodiversity.
Despite their critical importance for biodiversity and significant potential as nature-based solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation, ponds and pondscapes have traditionally been undervalued and overlooked.
The Horizon2020 PONDERFUL project brought together an international consortium to investigate the potential of these small habitats as nature-based solutions. This new knowledge, along with existing expertise from the PONDERFUL partners, has been brought together into a new technical handbook.
Ponds and Pondscapes: A technical guide to the use of ponds...
Despite their critical importance for biodiversity and potential as nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation and mitigation, ponds and pondscapes are not well represented in policy. Most freshwater legislation is biased towards rivers, with ponds largely being ignored.
The Horizon 2020 PONDERFUL project has revealed more about the importance of ponds for wildlife and people and, to make this accessible to policy makers, the partnership produced a policy guidance document: sing ponds and pondscapes as nature-based solutions: Guidance for policy makers on the...
The Lake Mogan Pondscape aims to conserve biodiversity, improve water management, and provide recreational spaces. It also plays a critical role in flood mitigation, provides nature’s contributions to people such as habitat provision and water quality regulation.
This pondscape plays a critical role in flood mitigation, water management, and biodiversity conservation in the Gölbaşı region. It supports urban and peri-urban ecosystems, enhances water quality, and provides recreational spaces, offering significant environmental and social benefits.
This pondscape plays a key role in flood mitigation and water management in Ankara, supporting biodiversity despite urbanization. It provides crucial ecosystem services like habitat provision and water regulation, while offering recreational spaces for the public, benefiting both urban and rural areas.
This Pondscape is in a suburban area of Aarhus, with 18 ponds and about 10,300 inhabitants. The ponds reduce flood risk and enhance biodiversity, supporting amphibians, birds, and aquatic plants. It also offers walking paths and educates people about nature and environmental protection.
This pondscape is located in a farmland near Leicester. All waterbodies in three upper catchments have been monitored since 2010. The results show an underlying landscape-wide decline in freshwater plant biodiversity of 0.5-1% pa. However doubling the number of clean-water ponds turned the decline around: producing a steep increase in richness and tripled the number of uncommon species.
In Uruguay, rural artificial ponds (tajamares) are primarily constructed to support cattle production and secondarily for the irrigation of crops or other purposes, mostly since the early 2000s. Studies on their environmental impact are extremely scarce and incipient.
A de-construction project where a failed attempt of urbanization was substituted by a fully functional salt marsh ecosystem. La Pletera is a coastal salt marsh located in a very touristic zone and was affected by building works for a residential estate in the late 80s, and then discontinued in the 90s. After that, the area was protected and an ecological restoration project was developed, aimed to satisfy a long-held local aspiration: the restoration of the ecologically highly valuable saltmarsh that was partially destroyed by a construction project at the end of the 1980s.
