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Small waterbodies and littoral zones are particularly important at the landscape scale to highly contribute to regional biodiversity, and they provide stepping-stones and increased connectivity between freshwater habitats.

These ecosystems are vital for many rare and endangered species, and support the meta-populations of many aquatic species, including plants, invertebrates and amphibians. We study how different ecological rules fit the patterns shown by freshwater communities at various spatial scales, in small waterbodies and littoral zones. Communities are approached using abundance, distribution and diversity to evaluate theoretical concepts about specie-area relationships, species turnover patterns, intermediate disturbance hypothesis … Macroecological investigations are especially important nowadays to improve our knowledge of the causal mechanisms underlying diversity patterns and predict threats posed by global change to highly vulnerable and biodiversity-rich freshwater ecosystems.