Individual weight estimates for Great Lakes benthic invertebrates

We present mean individual weights for common benthic invertebrates of the Great Lakes collected from over 2,000 benthic samples and eight years of data collection (2012-2019), both as species-specific weights and average weights of larger taxonomic groups of interest. The dataset we have assembled is applicable to food web energy flow models, calculation of secondary production estimates, interpretation of trophic markers, and for understanding how biomass distribution varies by benthic invertebrate species in the Great Lakes. A corresponding data paper describes comparisons of these data to benthic invertebrates in other lakes., Data Collection
Benthic invertebrates were collected from the EPA R/V Lake Guardian from 2012-2019 as part of the EPA Great Lakes National Program Office GLBMP and Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative (CSMI) benthic surveys. GLBMP samples are collected in all five of the Great Lakes annually and CSMI samples are collected in one of the Great Lakes annually. GLBMP includes 57-63 stations each year: 11 in Lake Superior (and 2-7 additional stations since 2014), 11 in Lake Huron, 16 in Lake Michigan, 10 in Lake Erie, and 10 (9 since 2015) in Lake Ontario. The number of CSMI stations vary by year. CSMI surveys for each lake took place in the following years: Erie 2014 (97 stations), Michigan 2015 (140 stations), Superior 2016 (59 stations), Huron 2017 (118 stations), and Ontario 2018 (46 stations). Additional CSMI surveys have occurred since 2019, however, we did not include these survey data in our analysis because samples would be unbalanced with some lakes sampled twice and other..., , # Data from: Individual weight estimates for Great Lakes benthic invertebrates

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tx95x6b42](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tx95x6b42)

The files in this data set give information for benthic invertebrate weights for the Laurentian Great Lakes.
See companion data manuscript text for calculation methods. All files are formatted as comma-separated values and missing data are denoted with \"NA.\"

## Description of the data and file structure

Description for file \"IndividualWeights_AllData.csv\"
This file gives summary statistics of individual weights for species to the highest possible taxonomic
resolution, and separates by lake, depth, and/or basin when necessary. The column headers are as follows:
Name (character string) = Name of the taxonomic unit represented. Species in most cases.
Lake (character string) = Great Lake(s) represented in grouping. \"All\" indicates that all possible data from the Great Lakes was combined.
DepthZone_m (character string) = Depth z...