Development of Biological Diversity in Farmland Ponds

Abstract

ABSTRACT To describe the rate of pond diversity development and how the age of ponds affects diversity of plants, amphibians, and aquatic insects, eight recently created artificial ponds (four young ponds created in the year 2003 and four new ponds created in the year 2007) were compared to four reference ponds. For each pond, we recorded the presence of plants and the abundance of amphibians and aquatic insects in plots of 0.25 m2 along two orthogonal transects. Data were analyzed using rarefaction technique, permutation tests for multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA), and rank-abundance diagrams. The new and young ponds showed lower plant and aquatic insect species richness than the reference ponds, and the communities showed gradual changes over time in all three taxa Amphibians, which were absent from new ponds, reached the same species richness as in reference ponds five years after pond creation. PERMANOVA wormed on presence/absence data showed no significant differences in community composition for aquatic insects and amphibians among pond age but showed significant differences among ponds belonging to, the same age classes for all taxa studied.