In the UK, more than 20% of ponds could qualify as “priority habitats” for freshwater wildlife, yet only around 2% have been identified so far, according to experts.
Priority ponds are highly valuable water spaces that often act as last refuges for plants and animals lost from surrounding landscapes. This designation can help protect these ponds from construction projects and other environmental changes.
Because many of these ponds go unrecorded, the Freshwater Habitats Trust (FHT) has called on citizen scientists to help identify potential priority ponds. The Trust has launched the Priority Pond Assessment Survey (Pass) to enable volunteers to locate and document ponds that could be classified as priority habitats. Dr. Naomi Ewald, FHT’s technical director, describes these ponds as “oases of really valuable habitat worth finding and protecting.”
“It’s not even just about the whole community that they support but a lot of them support really important individual species that are now declining,” she said. “My particular area of interest is pond insects and lots of people will have heard about the tadpole shrimp, which is a species pretty much unchanged since the dinosaurs were around.
“They used to be quite widespread but are now reduced to just 10 ponds that we know about. That’s out of about 500,000 ponds across the UK.”
Research shows that ponds can support greater biodiversity and more rare species than larger water bodies, such as rivers and lakes. Yet, unlike rivers and lakes, ponds aren’t typically included on official maps for planning and protection, leaving them vulnerable to oversight.
Priority ponds, which range from just one square meter up to two hectares and can be permanent or seasonal, are rarely noted on maps used by planning authorities for freshwater habitat preservation.
Ewald said: “One of the most obvious type of priority ponds are something called pingo ponds, or kettle ponds, that were created at the time that the ice last retreated in Britain. Some of those ponds in our landscape today are around 20,000 years old.”
Priority habitat designation means that ponds must be considered in planning applications and flood management. To qualify, a pond must host a diverse range of plant and animal species or be notable for its age or rarity—such as ancient ice-age ponds.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is funding the campaign to map these priority ponds across the UK as part of a broader initiative to improve their protection. One volunteer, Keith Gittens, works at the World’s End site on Strensall Common near York, known for its rich biodiversity, including several dragonfly and damselfly species.
“If you have a good diversity of dragonflies, which are the top predator in the insect world, you know you have a good, rich habitat for all sorts of other wildlife,” said Gittens, who runs the Yorkshire Dragonfly Group. “We’ve already lost three out of four of our ponds in Britain over the past century, so maintaining and restoring the ones that we have left has never been so important.”
Survey assessments will be conducted until early October and exclude garden ponds. Findings from these surveys will be verified with more detailed biological analyses, contributing essential data to safeguard the UK’s priority ponds and the unique species they support.
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