Connect MyPond to Claude and ChatGPT
For Claude, ChatGPT, and any assistant that supports remote MCP connectors.
The MyPond connector lets an AI assistant read what MyPond holds about your ponds and run MyPond's own analysis on it. Ask why your pond turned green, whether you are ready to treat, or what the soils under it mean for water loss, and the assistant answers from your pond's measured data instead of guessing.
The short version
- Connector address: https://mypond.naturalwaterscapes.com/mcp
- It is read-only. It never changes a pond, logs a reading, records a treatment or places an order.
- It reads only the ponds your MyPond account can already see.
- General pond questions work without an account. Questions about your own pond need a free MyPond account with at least one pond in it.
- Before you connect
- Connect in Claude
- Connect in ChatGPT
- What the sign-in asks for
- What the assistant can do
- Starter prompts
- What it will not do
- Troubleshooting
- Disconnecting
- Getting help
1. Before you connect
Sign up at mypond.naturalwaterscapes.com and trace your pond's shoreline on the map. MyPond builds the soil, geology and watershed profile from that outline. Depth readings, taken on the water, give the pond a measured volume. Water quality readings and treatments you record become its history. The more of that is in MyPond, the more the assistant has to work from.
The connector signs in with your MyPond account. It will not create one, so make the account first and use the same sign-in when the assistant asks.
2. Connect in Claude
If MyPond appears in Claude's connector directory, add it from there and skip the client ID below. Otherwise add it by its address:
- Pro and Max: open Customize, then Connectors, select the plus button, choose Add custom connector, and paste the connector address.
- Team and Enterprise: an organization Owner adds it under Organization settings, then Connectors, then Add, Custom, Web. Each member then connects it for themselves.
- Free: the same steps as Pro. Claude's free plan allows one custom connector.
In the connector's OAuth settings, choose to use your own OAuth client, enter this client ID, and leave the client secret empty:
When you first ask about your own pond, Claude opens the MyPond sign-in. Anthropic's current steps are in its help article on custom connectors.
3. Connect in ChatGPT
If MyPond appears in ChatGPT's directory, add it from there and skip the client ID below. Adding a connector by its address uses ChatGPT's developer mode, which OpenAI describes in its help article on developer mode and MCP apps. Use the same connector address, choose OAuth, enter this client ID, and leave the client secret empty:
Sign in with your MyPond account when ChatGPT asks.
4. What the sign-in asks for
Connecting opens the MyPond sign-in page and then asks you to allow the connection. It asks for three things:
- Your email address, which is how MyPond finds your account.
- Your profile, your name as MyPond holds it.
- Permission to stay connected, so you are not asked to sign in again every time the assistant uses MyPond.
MyPond logs each request the assistant makes: your account, the tool used, the pond involved, whether it succeeded, the assistant's identifying string and the IP address the request came from. The Privacy Policy covers this in full, including how long the logs are kept and what the assistant's provider does with what it reads.
5. What the assistant can do
Without an account
- Search MyPond knowledge: answers general pond questions from MyPond's published guides, with a link to the page behind each answer.
- Get a MyPond capability in full: the full method behind one capability or problem guide, including the public datasets it draws on.
- Get the public demo pond: live readings from a real, instrumented pond.
With your MyPond account
- List my ponds: the ponds your account can see, with size, measured volume and your role.
- Get a pond profile: morphometry and volume, soils under the footprint, bedrock geology, and the watershed with its land cover and runoff.
- Get water quality history: readings with value, unit, date and depth, and a note wherever a reading was stored in a different unit from the one MyPond rates it in.
- Get treatment history: what was applied, how much, and when.
- Get native plants for the pond's county: native wetland and shoreline plants documented in the county, with their habitat values.
- Get invasive aquatic species for the pond's county: invasive species documented in the county, with their impact, control methods and state regulations.
- Size an aeration system for the pond: MyPond's aeration designer run on the pond's measured area and depth.
- Get MyPond treatment recommendations: MyPond's treatment engine run on the latest readings. Not yet available to customer accounts through the connector; the assistant will tell you so and work from your readings instead.
County lookups use the county your pond sits in. The connector does not give the assistant your pond's address or coordinates.
6. Starter prompts
Assistants that support them show MyPond's starter prompts as one-tap starting points. Each hands the assistant a working plan for a situation owners actually arrive with:
- What can MyPond tell me about my pond?
- Explain my pond profile to me
- Review my water quality readings
- My pond has turned green
- My pond is losing water
- Fish are dying or gasping
- Am I ready to treat my pond?
There are sixteen in all, from planning depth readings to underwater weeds. Plain questions work just as well.
7. What it will not do
- It will not change anything. To log a reading, record a treatment, add depth points or order a product, the assistant will tell you what to do in MyPond and why.
- It will not read a pond your account cannot see, and that applies to Natural Waterscapes staff accounts too.
- It will not treat a missing record as a fact. No readings in MyPond means none were recorded, not that the water was never tested.
- It will not size aeration for a pond with no depth readings. A guessed depth sizes the wrong system.
8. Troubleshooting
"This identity has no MyPond account yet"
The sign-in worked, but no MyPond account uses that email. Sign in at mypond.naturalwaterscapes.com with the same email, add a pond, then connect again.
The assistant says there are no ponds
The account has no ponds yet, or none have been shared with it. Trace one in MyPond, or ask the owner of a pond to share it with you.
"You do not have access to this pond"
The assistant asked about a pond your account cannot see. Ask it to list your ponds first, and pick from that list.
"Too many lookups in the last minute"
Plant, invasive species and aeration lookups share a limit per account per minute. Wait a minute and ask again.
The aeration designer sized nothing
The pond has no depth readings, so there is no measured average depth to size from. Add depth readings in MyPond and ask again.
The assistant cannot reach MyPond, or keeps asking you to sign in
Check that the connector uses the address and the client ID above for that assistant. Then remove it in the assistant's settings, add it again, and sign in when asked. If it still fails, email us with the assistant you are using and the exact message you see.
9. Disconnecting
Remove MyPond from the assistant's connector settings. The assistant can no longer read your ponds from that point. What it has already read is governed by its provider's terms, as the Privacy Policy explains.
10. Getting help
Natural Waterscapes LLC
MyPond is built by Natural Waterscapes. Read the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, or see live data from a real pond.