Site-level aquatic biodiversity and water-quality data from the Yangtze River

This public dataset accompanies the manuscript “Climate Outweighs Anthropogenic Impacts in Shaping Yangtze Planktonic and Benthic Biodiversity under Protection Initiative”. It contains 117 site records and 36 variables covering essential sampling metadata, measured water quality, and site-level biodiversity indicators for phytoplankton, zooplankton, and macrozoobenthos. The dataset is provided as a formatted Excel workbook and a UTF-8 CSV, with a README, data dictionary, and CC BY 4.0 license. Regional climate, topographic, land-cover, ecological-zoning, and human-activity predictors were removed before public release. The retained Temp(℃) field is measured water temperature; the regional climatic Temperature(℃) field was excluded. The released table contains no missing cells or duplicate site identifiers. It contains site-level summary indicators rather than underlying site-by-taxon composition matrices.