Abstract
Small lentic water bodies such as agricultural ponds, mire pools, floodplain pools, oxbow lakes, and lagoons around lakes play important roles in the conservation of biodiversity in terms of providing important habitats to wildlife. A geographical information system (GIS) was applied to infer the spatial distribution and relative abundance of small lentic water bodies throughout Japan using the latest geospatial data sets. We selectively sampled every polygon data for small lentic water bodies by excluding those for natural lakes, dammed lakes, rivers and small bay and those for water bodies defined not preferable to wildlife habitats such as wastewater treatment plants, industrial sites and golf yards from all open water bodies depicted in the topographical maps with the scale size of 1/25,000. These procedures revealed that inferred small lentic water bodies compiled for a unit grid with ca. 10 by 10 km distributed widely throughout Japanese terrestrial areas, and that the greater densities (442-903 polygons per an unit grid) of small lentic water bodies were detected in the coastal region of the Seto Inland Sea, where numerous agricultural ponds exist. Our GIS processed database of small lentic water bodies can provide fundamental and potential resources for assessing regional biodiversity.
