Foreword

With the development of our awareness on sustainable development in resources and the environment, many new scientific and practical topics are emerging, such as best management practices, low impact development, and nature-based solutions. Relative to large and well-regarded water bodies, such as lakes and rivers, small water bodies, including both natural and man-made ponds, pools, streams, etc., are sometimes numerous, widely distributed,and tightly linked to socio-economic development, with multiple ecosystem services to the well-being of human society. Their small size and shallow characteristics, however, leave them traditionally unmonitored, unmapped,and poorly protected and less studied in existing environmental geosciences and relative sustainable management practices. Over the last decade, growing attention is paid to small water bodies from the scientific community and management sectors such as environmental protection, sustainable agriculture,urban planning, etc. This new trend brings a set of recent research and practical initiatives that high light the characteristics and importance of small water bodies across different geographical and climatic regions.

This monograph Hydro-environmental Assessment of Small Water Bodies: From Local to Global Scales timely focuses on small water bodies, in which the authors put great efforts and invested long time on the hydro-environmental assessment of small water bodies at local scales in Jiangsu Province,southeastern China, and perspectives at regional scale of entire southern China and global scales. Based on multidisciplinary research methods and various datasets, and for farm ponds and small reservoirs of southeastern China and the world's non-floodplain wetlands, the authors have successfully verified the hydro-environmental effects of small water bodies in these regions, and proposed new findings for management and environmental sustainability.

In a nutshell, the results obtained in this monograph substantially enhance the knowledge of hydro-environmental effects of small water bodies, especially farm ponds and small reservoirs, at local and regional scales. This knowledge provides useful means to the sustainable use and protection of small water bodies, including the enhancement of their ecosystem services (particularly the ecosystem services of nutrient retention and flood reduction). Furthermore,the refined models and analytic methods of targeted hydro-environmental assessment are potentially transferable to other regions with abundant small water bodies and applicable in future research. I believe that this monograph will provide a useful knowledge base and tool for researchers and resource managers to improve the sustainable use and protection of small water bodies.

Wenjun Chen and Bin He
May 2023