Potential Ephemeral Ponds, WI DNR

Created By:

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

Description:

Ephemeral ponds have standing water present only a portion of the year, drying up later in the summer. The drying phase excludes fish, and their absence as a predator and competitor makes these ponds ideal breeding habitat for a variety of amphibians, macroinvertebrates, and other wildlife during spring and early summer. During the wet phase eggs are laid, hatch, and the young must complete development to emerge as air-breathing adults before the pond dries up.  Citizen monitoring started in 2008 in southeastern Wisconsin, with training sessions carried out by a Citizen Monitoring Network of more than 12 Partner organizations working with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) and UW-Extension. In the first two years of monitoring adult volunteers in Sheboygan, Ozaukee, Washington, Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties have monitored 159 sites. They paid monthly visits to areas mapped as "potential ephemeral ponds" or PEPs, using a simple one-page field sheet to document water presence, size, depth and other physical characteristics. WDNR uses citizen data to help confirm whether a mapped PEP is an ephemeral pond.The Wisconsin Ephemeral Ponds Project (WEPP) was initiated in 2006 when the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) and Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC) began mapping ephemeral ponds through air photo interpretation and collecting physical and biological data on ephemeral ponds in southeastern Wisconsin. The project has two main goals: to improve techniques to map small ephemeral ponds that are often missed on wetland inventory maps, and to characterize their physical and hydrological variety, and their ecological significance.  Additional information about this effort can be found at these websites: http://watermonitoring.uwex.edu/level1/wepp/index.html and https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/Wetlands/documents/reportEphemeralPondsMappingAccuracyAssessment.pdf.

Collection:

Wisconsin Open Data Sites and Wisconsin State Agencies

Year(s):

2024

Held By:

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

More details at:

https://data-wi-dnr.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/wi-dnr::potential-ephemeral-ponds