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Small freshwater systems in agricultural landscapes are potentially exposed to pollution from plant protection products and fertilizers, as well as habitat alteration and degradation, leading to changes and damage to aquatic species communities. At the same time, small waterbodies are diverse habitats that harbor the highest species diversity and the highest proportion of endangered species at landscape scale compared to other aquatic ecosystems such as lakes, rivers or streams. As stepping stone biotopes, they also play an essential role in the dispersal of species and contribute to habitat diversity and heterogeneity of the landscape. A national biological monitoring system for small waterbodies does not exist to date and its conceptual development is not trivial due to the number and diversity of these exosystems - in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania alone there are about 60.000 small waterbodies in or adjacent to agricultural land.
For representative, nationwide monitoring of the biodiversity of small water bodies, at least 80 bodies of water per type of small water body are sampled. These should be between 0.15 ha and 1.0 ha in size and be surrounded by at least 90% agricultural land in a buffer of 500 m. The number of water bodies examined is divided among the agricultural areas and federal states represented in proportion to their actual frequency.
