Haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about, you say?
If you’ve ever heard the deafening trilling of spring peepers or wood frogs in the spring, or peered into shallow water at tadpoles, you’ve been exposed to these small but vital bodies of temporary water.
Because they dry up at some point, usually every year, they don’t harbor fish. And thus they are a crucial cradle for a rich plethora of life, from several kinds of frogs and salamanders, to dragonflies and fairy shrimp.
And now, you’re being asked to spread out across Lancaster County and find these ephemeral pools, which often exist solely on the vagaries of snowmelt and spring rains.
The Pennsylvania Seasonal Pools Project is trying to drum up an army of “citizen scientists” to head afield and pinpoint and map, for the first time, the locations of the tens of thousands of seasonal pools across the state.
“We just don’t know how many are out there. That’s what’s holding us back,” says Ephraim Zimmerman, an ecologist with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, one of the partners in the effort to map, study and save Pennsylvania’s seasonal pools.
“They’re just an incredible mass of biodiversity.”
Adds Betsy Leppo, who studies seasonal pools for The Nature Conservancy in the group’s Middletown office, “People have really been interested in them for a long time, but there’s been no effort to get them all together and get a layer of locations we can look at.”
Seasonal, or vernal, ponds exist in remote wooded settings and open fields, often several near each other.
They can be fashioned from dips in floodplains or in the little hole caused by a tree’s root ball when a tree falls over.
In short, they’re pretty nondescript. For much of the year, they may even be bone dry and undetectable to someone trudging by.
But when they fill in spring, all manner of amphibians trudge like zombies to them to continue their existence.
Scientists know a lot about the creatures that depend on them: Jefferson, spotted and marbled salamanders, which emerge from crevices where they survived the winter and march to the pools.
Also red-spotted newts, wood frogs and green frogs, damselflies and dragonflies, diving beetles and tiny crustaceans such as fairy shrimp, which lay eggs months earlier in the abiding faith that the water will again materialize.
Zimmerman uses the word “charismatic” to describe these unique natural habitats.
But there is still much we don’t know, such as regional differences in seasonal ponds. Do the creatures prefer seasonal pools fed by groundwater or purely rainfall? Can artificial pools humans build work well? What role does surrounding flora play?
Because of their diminutive and temporary nature, seasonal pools don’t show up on satellite surveys that map the nation’s wetlands. And they aren’t as well protected as permanent wetlands.
Thus, they often get filled in for development, or honestly overlooked.
The Pennsylvania Seasonal Pools Project, which began last year and concludes in the summer of 2007, hopes to change that. This spring and summer’s mass canvassing by volunteers like you is key.
A Web site will make it easier to post locations of seasonal pools. The site is up now (www.paconserve.org/rc/sp) but is not complete. Within two weeks, the site also will include directions on how to participate in the survey, field guides for plants and fauna characteristic of seasonal pools and, eventually, a running data base of all seasonal pools reported, to avoid duplication.
In the meantime, if you know of a seasonal pool, no matter how small, dispatch an e-mail to Sarah Schager of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy at sschager@paconserve.org. 
