Abstract
Freshwater conservation is vital to the maintenance of global biodiversity. Ponds are a critical, yet often under‐recognized, part of this, contributing to overall ecosystem functioning and diversity. They provide habitats for a range of aquatic, terrestrial, and amphibious life, often including rare and declining species.Effective, rapid, and accessible survey methods are needed to enable evidence‐based conservation action, but freshwater taxa are often viewed as “difficult”—and few specialist surveyors are available. Datasets on ponds are therefore limited in their spatiotemporal coverage.With the advent of new recording technologies, acoustic survey methods are becoming increasingly available to researchers, citizen scientists, and conservation practitioners. They can be an effective and noninvasive approach for gathering data on target species, assemblages, and environmental variables. However, freshwater applications are lagging behind those in terrestrial and marine spheres, and as an emergent method, research studies have employed a multitude of different sampling protocols.We propose the Pond Acoustic Sampling Scheme (PASS), a simple protocol to allow a standardized minimal sample to be collected rapidly from small waterbodies, alongside environmental and methodological metadata. This sampling scheme can be incorporated into a variety of survey designs and is intended to allow access to a wide range of participants, without requiring complicated or prohibitively expensive equipment.Adoption of this sampling protocol would enable consistent sound recordings to be gathered by researchers and conservation organizations, and allow the development of landscape‐scale surveys, data sharing, and collaboration within an expanding freshwater ecoacoustic community—rather than individual approaches that produce incompatible datasets. The compilation of standardized data would improve the prospects for effective research into the soundscapes of small waterbodies and aid freshwater conservation efforts.
Highlights
| INTRODUCTIONFreshwater biodiversity is globally threatened by overexploitation, pollution, hydrological modification, habitat destruction, and invasive species (Cantonati et al, 2020; Dudgeon et al, 2006)
We propose the Pond Acoustic Sampling Scheme (PASS), a simple protocol to allow a standardized minimal sample to be collected rapidly from small waterbodies, alongside environmental and methodological metadata
Pond habitats were included in just 11% of studies, and aquatic arthropods were only represented in 26% of studies, despite their significant contributions to freshwater ecosystem function and soundscape composition
Summary
Freshwater biodiversity is globally threatened by overexploitation, pollution, hydrological modification, habitat destruction, and invasive species (Cantonati et al, 2020; Dudgeon et al, 2006). A Rapid Assessment Method is a standardized procedure that allows efficient generation of an index score, representing the ecological status or ecosystem function of a particular site, and summarizing key components of habitat integrity (hydrological, physical, chemical, and biological; Dorney et al, 2018; Mainstone et al, 2018) Developing such an approach for ponds would have value for researchers and citizen scientists, meeting a clear requirement for (i) improved collation and sharing of harmonized data, (ii) the integration of biological, physical, and chemical parameters, and (iii) increased geographical coverage of information on pond quality and biodiversity (Cantonati et al, 2020; Heino et al, 2020). Rountree et al (2020) conclude that researchers should attempt to increase the number of studies using real-time sound monitoring in the field, with visual observations of the recorded soundscape, alongside other projects that focus on the collection of long-term soundscape recordings
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