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When does a pond become a lake?
- Thread starter pdaddy
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I consulted my Ecology of Inland Waters and Estuaries, Reid and Wood, (c) 1976, Chapt. 3, Lake Basins and Lakes, Pg 31. and they said:
It is harder to distinquish lakes from ponds, because neither term is nessarily restricted to any one kind of environment. Lakes and ponds are formed in a number of diffferent ways, both natural and artificial. With the passage fo time, they change in character, ultimately silting up and becoming gransformed to wetland or meadow. Bodies of standing water also change in character as you travel from north to south. For all these reasons there can be no hard and fast difference between a "lake" and a "pond". Moreover, local usage further complicates the issue: the large lakes of Maine and the Adirondacks are refered locally as "ponds", whereas certain streaches of Florida's slow moving St. Johns River are called "lakes", although they are flowing, rather than standing, waters.
For our purposes we can relay on a basic distinction between large expances of open water, on the one hand, and small bodies of water (often thickly filled with plant growth) on the other. These represent two extreme conditions but they will serve as a basis for out working definition. For laymen and scientists alike the term pond generally suggests a small, quiet body of standing water, usually shallow enough to permit the growth of rooted plants from one shore to the other. Larger bodies of standing water, occupying distinctive basins, we will refer to as lakes...
(took this from some archived forum)
It is harder to distinquish lakes from ponds, because neither term is nessarily restricted to any one kind of environment. Lakes and ponds are formed in a number of diffferent ways, both natural and artificial. With the passage fo time, they change in character, ultimately silting up and becoming gransformed to wetland or meadow. Bodies of standing water also change in character as you travel from north to south. For all these reasons there can be no hard and fast difference between a "lake" and a "pond". Moreover, local usage further complicates the issue: the large lakes of Maine and the Adirondacks are refered locally as "ponds", whereas certain streaches of Florida's slow moving St. Johns River are called "lakes", although they are flowing, rather than standing, waters.
For our purposes we can relay on a basic distinction between large expances of open water, on the one hand, and small bodies of water (often thickly filled with plant growth) on the other. These represent two extreme conditions but they will serve as a basis for out working definition. For laymen and scientists alike the term pond generally suggests a small, quiet body of standing water, usually shallow enough to permit the growth of rooted plants from one shore to the other. Larger bodies of standing water, occupying distinctive basins, we will refer to as lakes...
(took this from some archived forum)
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