Pond conservation: towards a delineation of pondscape

1. Faced with the prospect of dealing with several hundred or even thousands of habitat sites, environmental managers in dense pond landscapes often have insufficient information.  2. In addition, there is a need to treat pond habitats as a totality, in that the intervening terrestrial matrix is relevant to the distribution and persistence of certain species.  3. Part of the terrestrial matrix is concerned with the spatial distribution of ponds and their ‘connectedness’, termed here ‘pondscape’.  4. An initial approach to delineating ‘pondscape’ is demonstrated. Such delineation enables environmental managers not only to conceptualize core areas of pond habitat, but also to trace changes in spatial extent and form, and to predict (and where necessary mitigate) changes arising from proposed development.  5. Though the approach is in part an abstraction, it also provides the advantages of synoptic description, monitoring and planning evaluation. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.