4. Fountains—Overlooked Small Water Bodies in the Urban Areas

Urban and suburban areas represent a specific environment supporting the development of particular terrestrial and aquatic communities. Excluding streams and rivers, most water bodies in the urban areas are man-made, created for various purposes (e.g. decoration, recreation, gravel excavation, irrigation). Rather extreme ecosystems are the city fountains that have been usually overlooked in limnological studies. Despite the extreme environmental variables, especially water pH, temperature, turbulence, disinfection and cleaning activities, which make them inhospitable for many organisms, fountains do sustain a development of specific invertebrate communities, particularly insects, including a dipteran family Chironomidae. Studies dedicated to this unique man-made ecosystem are scarce. Those carried out indicate that fountains can harbour both very diverse chironomid communities (e.g., in Europe), but they can also be extremely species poor (e.g., in South America). The typical fountain community consists of common taxa with very wide ecological requirements together with rare species living in specific habitats, such as water distribution systems, hygropetric- and terrestrial habitats. The many new records found in fountains of countries with well-known chironomid faunas (e.g., Denmark and Czech Republic) further emphasize the importance and peculiarity of fountains. City fountains, as extreme habitat as they are, still represent very important shallow water bodies acting as a source of biodiversity in the urban areas and deserve more attention. In this chapter we (1) review the literature dealing with fountain biota and (2) bring new data from this specific habitat in the Balkans (Osijek and Varaždin, Croatia).