**5. Conclusions**

It is most important to recognize the crucial ecological role of temporary ponds. The numerous threats interesting these habitats are gradually causing their extinction, especially in the Mediterranean region where, unfortunately, not all states must

#### *Monitoring of Temporary Ponds as Indicators of Environmental Quality DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107885*

comply with European legislation because they are not included in the Economic Community. Therefore, the aforementioned environmental legislation does not apply to them. However, the conservation of ponds, regardless of laws and states of origin, is essential, and appropriate political and management measures should be taken immediately to prevent their disappearance.

The results of the present study show how temporary ponds can be used to improve the knowledge necessary for understanding the matrices' quality status in the River Basin of interest. The application of the proposed methodology made it possible to identify that in some areas, there is a greater risk on the water matrix and in others on the soil matrix based on a retro analysis based on the evaluation of pressures.

As far as water bodies are concerned, this type of monitoring not only allows the identification of a series of site-specific pressures but also an assessment of the state of the water matrix when monitoring operations are challenging to implement due to environmental conditions (e.g. dense vegetation or the presence of difficult accesses). In addition, considering these types of torrents, they are naturally created in a karst landscape, and therefore, their monitoring is carried out only on underground water bodies increasing costs for the opening through excavation and maintenance of wells. With this methodology, monitoring surface water bodies could be extended by increasing the cognitive picture of the quality of the water matrix with a minimum cost.

The integrated evaluation of the analysis of pressures and monitoring data can therefore be used to guide environmental control activities based on criteria of priority. This approach makes it possible to integrate the results of environmental controls, for example, both in the planning of monitoring and in the definition of protection measures.

### **Acknowledgements**

The authors thank Domenico Bellifemine for his valuable support in data acquisition campaigns.

### **Author details**

Claudia Campanale, Vito Felice Uricchio and Carmine Massarelli\* Water Research Institute of Italian National Research Council, Italy

\*Address all correspondence to: carmine.massarelli@ba.irsa.cnr.it

© 2022 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
