Professor University College London, United Kingdom
Abstract: Farmland ponds are aquatic ecosystems embedded in agricultural landscapes. The ponds have been a very historic part in British agricultural landscapes for centuries. They provide a wide array of habitats and refuges for aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity encompassing plants, invertebrates and vertebrates (amphibians and fishes). These ponds are ecologically significant for biodiversity conservation despite their size, yet remain threatened by many factors, namely, agricultural intensification, pond terrestrialization, cessation of traditional pond management practices, pond loss and land reclamation, etc. During 1960-1970s with the agricultural intensification, it is widely thought that many lowland UK ponds started to become overgrown by scrubs and trees due to the cessation of traditional pond management practices, rendering them low in terms of aquatic biodiversity and in need of restoration.
Aiming to inform the restoration and conservation of aquatic biodiversity in English farmland ponds, this research is employing palaeoecological technique to investigate long-term changes in pond ecosystems through a multi-pond approach, especially due to pond terrestrialization and past pond management events. Using plant and animal macrofossil analysis, the project will examine post-restoration success on returning pre-terrestrialization wetland plant communities to restored ponds as well as determining the extent to which multiple ponds in the same areas were managed in the past. Four farmland ponds in Heydon (a village in Norfolk, eastern England) have been selected for the study. The long-term data afforded by pond sediment cores analysed for plant and animal macrofossils will afford decadal-centennial level information on the occurrence, trajectory and nature of ecological changes in ponds in the context of past pond management practices, natural successional processes and on-going as well as future pond restoration. The project is crucial in terms of conservation success and historical appropriateness of conservation work involving scrub management in farmland ponds which are largely untouched resources in the UK agricultural landscapes.
