Abstract
Ponds provide vital ecological services. They are biodiversity hotspots and important breading sites for rare and endangered species, including amphibians and dragonflies. Nevertheless, their number is decreasing due to habitat degradation caused by human activities. The âPonds with Lifeâ environmental education project was developed to raise public awareness and engagement in the study of ponds by promoting the direct contact between the public and nature, researchers and pedagogical hands-on exploration activities. A pre-post- project survey was set-up to assess the effects of the project on the environmental consciousness, knowledge and attitude changes towards ponds and the associated biodiversity of school students aged 15 to 18. The survey questions were based on Likert scales and their pre-post project comparisons used an innovative multivariate hypothesis testing approach. The results showed that the project improved the studentsâ knowledge and attitudes towards ponds and associated biodiversity, especially the amphibians. Ponds can be found or constructed in urban areas and despite small sized, they proved to be interesting model habitats and living laboratories to foster environmental education, by encompassing a high number of species and a fast ecological succession.
Highlights
Ponds are small shallow water bodies, natural or artificial, permanent or temporary and characterized by an accentuated seasonal pattern of the water level or hydroperiod [1,2,3,4,5]
The centroids matrix was submitted to ordination analysis using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS), and tested for the null hypothesis of no significant difference between the pre- and post-project, using a one-way Analysis of Similarities (ANOSIM)
Knowledge acquired in environmental education programs may not last long and projects solely based on knowledge acquisition may not be as efficient in driving attitude changes
Summary
Ponds are small shallow water bodies, natural or artificial, permanent or temporary and characterized by an accentuated seasonal pattern of the water level or hydroperiod [1,2,3,4,5]. They exist in all continents and are considered biodiversity hotspots due to their importance as breading sites for amphibians, dragonflies and other invertebrates, as well as key habitats for diverse fauna and aquatic plants [1, 2, 5, 6]. Mediterranean temporary ponds, in particular, have many endemic species and are protected by the directive 92/43 CEE [8], by European Commission Natura 2000 network (habitat 3170) and by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands [1, 3,4,5, 9, 10].
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