A pond is a small, still, land-based body of water formed by pooling inside a depression, either naturally or artificially. A pond is smaller than a lake and there are no official criteria distinguishing the two, although defining a pond to be less than 5 hectares in area, less than 5 metres in depth and with less than 30% of its area covered by emergent vegetation helps in distinguishing the ecology of ponds from those of lakes and wetlands.
