Abstract Natural ponds are perceived as spatially and temporally highly variable ecosystems. This perception is in contrast to the often-applied sampling design with high spatial but low temporal replication. Based on a data set covering a period of six years and 20 permanently to periodically inundated ponds, we investigated whether this widely applied sampling design is sufficient to identify differences between single ponds or single years with regard to water quality and macrophyte community composition as measures of ecosystem integrity. In our study, the factor “pond”, which describes differences between individual ponds, explained 56 % and 63 %, respectively, of the variance in water quality and macrophyte composition. In contrast, the factor “year” that refers to changes between individual years, contributed less to understand the observed variability in water quality and macrophyte composition (10 % and 7 % respectively, of the variance explained). The low explanation of variance for “year” and the low year-to-year correlation for the single water quality parameter or macrophyte coverage values, respectively, indicated high but non-consistent temporal variability affecting individual pond patterns. In general, the results largely supported the ability of the widely applied sampling strategy with about one sampling date per year to capture differences in water quality and macrophyte community composition between ponds. Hence, future research can be rest upon sampling designs that give more weight to the number of ponds than the number of years in dependence on the research question and the available resources. Nonetheless, pond research would miss a substantial amount of information (7 to 10 % of the variance explained), when the sampling would generally be restricted to one year. Moreover, we expect that the importance of multiple-year sampling will likely increase in periods and regions of higher hydrological variability compared to the average hydrological conditions encountered in the studied period.

中文翻译：

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我们从天然池塘研究的多年采样中获得了多少信息？

摘要 天然池塘被认为是空间和时间高度可变的生态系统。这种看法与经常应用的具有高空间但低时间复制的抽样设计形成对比。基于涵盖 6 年和 20 年永久到周期性淹没池塘的数据集，我们调查了这种广泛应用的采样设计是否足以识别单个池塘或单个年份之间在水质和大型植物群落组成方面的差异，作为衡量生态系统完整性。在我们的研究中，描述单个池塘之间差异的因素“池塘”分别解释了水质和大型植物组成差异的 56% 和 63%。相比之下，因子“年份”指的是各个年份之间的变化，对了解观察到的水质和大型植物组成变化的贡献较小（分别为解释的方差的 10% 和 7%）。“年份”的低方差解释和单一水质参数或大型植物覆盖率值的低逐年相关性分别表明影响单个池塘模式的高但不一致的时间变异性。总的来说，结果在很大程度上支持了广泛应用的采样策略的能力，每年大约有一个采样日期，可以捕捉池塘之间水质和大型植物群落组成的差异。因此，未来的研究可以依赖于根据研究问题和可用资源赋予池塘数量比年数更多权重的抽样设计。尽管如此，池塘研究会遗漏大量信息（解释的方差的 7% 到 10%），而采样通常会限制在一年内。此外，我们预计，与研究期间遇到的平均水文条件相比，在水文变率较高的时期和地区，多年采样的重要性可能会增加。