UCL Geography’s Pond Restoration Research Group is part of an 18 partner international research consortium that is running a new EU Horizon 2020 project ‘PONDERFUL’, led by the University of Vic (Spain).
The project aims to improve the use of ponds and pondscapes in managing the adaptation to climate change, biodiversity conservation and the delivery of ecosystem services.
The significance of ponds has commonly been underestimated. They are largely excluded from the European Water Framework Directive, even though this is intended to protect ‘all waters’. In the USA their inclusion in the protections provided by the Clean Water Act is also contested, and they lie outside regulatory systems in many other regions.
Research over the last 10-15 years has nevertheless shown that their abundance, diversity and biogeochemical potency means that ponds play a role in catchments and landscapes which is completely out of proportion to their small size, even potentially at the continental scale.
The main aims of PONDERFUL are to improve understanding of how ponds, as a Nature-based Solution (NBS), can support the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, the protection of biodiversity and the delivery of ecosystem services.
The five main components of the project are: engaging with stakeholders, developing new datasets, establishing models in support of pond management, creating a set of demonstration sites across Europe, and ensuring that policy makers and others are informed.
Experienced researchers will be brought together from nine European states, Turkey and Uruguay, and the project runs for 4 years from December 2020
See:
At work on pond restoration
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