Ponds, as landscape features, are known to regulate climate. Since ponds proliferate or recede due to natural or anthropogenic factors, a variation of pond numbers implies a variation of their climatic effect. Accordingly, this study investigates the impact of ponds on the local climate of the French Claise watershed. The latter was chosen because it contains a pond dense zone and a pondless zone. This repartition makes the Claise an adequate context to reveal the climatic impact of ponds even in the same landscape. To study the pond-climate effect, the parallel evolution of pond numbers variation and subsequent climatic impact must be tracked. Therefore, the remote sensing-derived Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) was extracted from LANDSAT images with different acquisition dates to track changes in pond numbers with time. When compared with a pond map established from aerial photography interpretation, the LANDSAT NDWI map revealed an accuracy of 85.74% for pond count and 75% for pond spatial allocation. This validation showed that NDWI is suitable for mapping the proliferation of ponds through time. In order to study the parallel evolution of the climatic effect, the land surface temperature (LST) index was extracted for each LANDSAT map. LST maps revealed that as a result of pond number variation, surface temperatures varied accordingly. A comparison of air temperatures between the ponded zone and pondless zones also revealed that pond zones had lower air temperatures than their direct surroundings. Accordingly, ponds were shown to buffer local microclimates even within the same landscape.
Keywords: Brenne; LST; Landscape limnology; NDWI; Ponds; Remote sensing.