Comparatively little is known about the refuge role of fire dams, urban artificial ponds, golf course lakes, disused industrial ponds and retaining walls.
"It's very long and narrow, which affords good views of the Sound on one side and the pond and golf courses on the other," he said.
Snacking high on the aquatic food chain in tens of thousands of U.S. lakes, ponds, reservoirs, golf course water hazards, irrigation ditches and roadside borrow pits lurks Micropterus salmoides, the largemouth bass.
It has become more common in urban landscapes in Florida since the late 1990s, and is one of a number of wetland-dependent bird species which forages in man-made ponds on golf courses in the southwest of the state.
In this study, we sampled turtles from 2010 to 2011 at 20 ponds, including farm (rural) ponds, ponds in urbanized environments, and golf course ponds.
"Let's be serious, not everybody looks at a murky, slimy, alligator-infested pond filled with golf course pesticide and fertilizer runoff and sees a business opportunity," Siwek said.
We used a hierarchical Bayesian species-richness model to estimate species richness and species-specific occupancy responses to three pond types (rural, golf, or urban) and four landscape measurements of greenspace (i.e., Euclidean nearest neighbor, interspersion juxtaposition, percent of landscape, and connectance), generated in FRAGSTATS.
The only reported U.S. fatality associated with toxic algae to date was a teenage boy in Wisconsin who played in a scum-covered pond at a golf course.
When the model examining the configuration of greenspaces was analyzed, estimated species richness was greater at golf ponds as compared to either rural or urban ponds, and richness increased with increasing connectivity of greenspaces.
Three Ponds features a golf course designed by Rees Jones, its own pro shop, 14 gardens and three ponds stocked with fish.
