European perspectives on regional estimates of standing water bodies and the relevance of man-made ponds

International audienceThe majority of terrestrial standing water bodies (SWB) are small in size, however, their abundance and distribution is not fully known and they are under-represented in legislation. Also, the models for global inventories of SWB are so far not sufficiently designed for estimating the relative abundance of small SWB (below 0.2 ha) and provide differing estimates. In this pilot study, we suggest a bottom-up approach for estimating the number of SWB at EU-level that combines the ground-validated data on water bodies from state inventories and data from peer-generated map databases; we assess the inventories and relative importance of small terrestrial water bodies of two different countries, Estonia and France

A new approach to inventorying bodies of water, from local to global scale

Having reliable estimates of the number of water bodies on different geographical scales is of great importance to better understand biogeochemical cycles and to tackle the social issues related to the economic and cultural use of water bodies. However, limnological research suffers from a lack of reliable inventories; the available scientific references are predominately based on water bodies of natural origin, large in size and preferentially located in previously glaciated areas. Artificial, small and randomly distributed water bodies, especially ponds, are usually not inventoried. Following Wetzel’s theory (1990), some authors included them in global inventories by using remote sensing or mathematical extrapolation, but fieldwork on the ground has been done on a very limited amount of territory. These studies have resulted in an explosive increase in the estimated number of water bodies, going from 8.44 million lakes (Meybeck 1995) to 3.5 billion water bodies (Downing 2010). These numbers raise several questions, especially about the methodology used for counting small-sized water bodies and the methodological treatment of spatial variables. In this study, we use inventories of water bodies for Sweden, Finland, Estonia and France to show incoherencies generated by the “global to local” approach. We demonstrate that one universal relationship does not suffice for generating the regional or global inventories of water bodies because local conditions vary greatly from one region to another and cannot be offset adequately by each other. The current paradigm for global estimates of water bodies in limnology, which is based on one representative model applied to different territories, does not produce sufficiently exact global inventories. The step-wise progression from the local to the global scale requires the development of many regional equations based on fieldwork; a specific equation that adequately reflects the actual relationship between distribution and abundance of water bodies in a given area must be produced for each geographical region

A quantitative assessment of the contribution of small standing water bodies to the European waterscapes -case of Estonia and France

International audienceThe abundance and properties of small standing water bodies (SSWB) is globally not well known for their ecological importance is undervalued and their detection suffers from technical limitations. In the current study, we used a combination of GIS-based methods (satellite, orthophoto, ground validation) to evaluate regional estimates of standing water body (SWB) inventories in two geographically different parts of Europe-France, and Estonia. In our study the SWBs surface area threshold limit was 0.00001 km 2 , exceeding the limits of previous studies (>0.002 km 2). The total number of SWBs in Estonia is 111 552 (2.5 per km 2) and in France 598 371 (1.1 per km 2). Our estimates show that the median size of SWBs in Estonia and France is 0.0003 km 2 and 0.0007 km 2 respectively, meaning that most of the SSWBs are not included in the global inventories, and their number is therefore underestimated. SSWBs (area below 0.01 km 2) form a significant share of the total shoreline length of SWBs, 70.3% in Estonia and 58.8% in France. As nearshore areas are often very productive with diverse habitats, the SSWBs hold a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity. Our results provide quantitative evidence that SSWBs are vital and abundant landscape elements, freshwater resources, and habitats that should not be ignored in global inventories