Aquatic Vegetation Assemblages in Ozark Ponds, Arkansas and Missouri, USA

Aquatic and semi-aquatic plant assemblages, water quality, riparian habitat, and landscape conditions were assessed for 140 ponds located in the Ozarks region in Arkansas and Missouri in order to better describe their occurrences and distributional patterns. Local environmental and landscape-level determinants that shape their diversity and influence their respective distributions, particularly in light of urbanization, were also assessed. Ozark ponds are highly variable in terms of physical structure, habitat quality, and plant diversity. Urban ponds were generally of lower quality in terms of environmental attributes compared to those in non-urban areas, but they had similar plant taxa richness as well as numbers of non-native species compared to their non-urban counterparts. Ponds had high plant diversity (N = 204 taxa, x¯ = 9.89, range = 0–33). Taxa richness increased with increasing pond size, and urban ponds had slightly more species on average compared to non-urban ponds (10.38 vs. 9.58, respectively). Spatial beta diversity of plants showed a high dissimilarity among ponds, with turnover being the dominant fraction. Beta diversity also followed a significant distance-decay model. These findings show that urban Ozark ponds serve as important habitats for a broad variety of aquatic plants.