Screening Priority Ponds at Scale: Freshwater Habitats Trust

Our Mission

Our partner for this mission, Freshwater Habitats Trust is working to preserve some of the most important habitats for biodiversity – small water bodies. These habitats support a wide variety of wildlife and are crucial for the survival of many endangered freshwater species.

Research suggests that small waterbodies could support as many as two-thirds of all freshwater plants and animals. Despite this they are an undervalued part of the freshwater network.

“Two out of three freshwater species can be found in ponds. Half of the UK’s ponds have disappeared over the course of the 20th century, and of those that remain, 80% are in a poor state.”

To preserve the value of these important places, Freshwater Habitats Trust needs to identify and map Priority Ponds – small waterbodies that have a particularly high conservation value: usually because they support important freshwater species. The Trust currently use a ground-based field assessment method for identification called PASS (Priority Pond Assessment).

With this method, citizen scientists collect data about the physical characteristics of individual ponds which is then used to calculate the likelihood that each of them is a priority habitat. This method works well both for identifying priority ponds and engaging communities in conservation work, but scale is limited by the field-based assessment.

FHT saw the results of our missions with the North Pennines National Landscape where our participants mapped and validated over 6000 water bodies in less than one month and realised there was potential to translate their PASS methodology into the Deep Time platform. Over the course of this mission, we will test Deep Time’s ability to accurately predict priority ponds using earth observation imagery, comparing our speed and accuracy to traditional methods.

It is estimated that up to one in 5 of the approximately 400,000 ponds in the UK could be Priority Ponds. As of now, only 2% of these potential habitats have been identified.

Using Deep Time, we have the potential to identify these key habitats, allowing them to be conserved.