Colorado aquatic macroinvertebrate samples and duck counts

Food availability varies considerably over space and time in wetland systems, and consumers must be able to track those changes during nutrient demanding points in the life cycle like breeding. Resource tracking has been studied frequently among herbivores, but receives less attention among consumers of macroinvertebrates. We evaluated the change in resource availability across habitat types and time, and the simultaneous density of waterfowl consumers throughout their breeding season in a high-elevation, flood-irrigated system. We also assessed whether the macroinvertebrate resource density better predicted waterfowl density across habitats, compared to consistency (i.e., temporal evenness) of the invertebrate resource or taxonomic richness. Resource density varied marginally across wetland types but was highest in basin wetlands (i.e., ponds) and peaked early in the breeding season, whereas it remained relatively low and stable in other wetland habitats. Breeding duck density was posi..., Macroinvertebrate Data Collection
We collected nektonic invertebrate samples using 2-L activity traps in 2020 and 2021 (Murkin et al. 1983). We placed traps at randomly-selected points within 40 wetland sites that encompassed the five different wetland habitats. The sites we sampled in four of the wetland habitats (basin wetlands, riparian wetlands, irrigation ditches, and flooded hay meadows) spanned three individual properties, including two private ranches and Arapaho NWR (Figure 1). We also sampled three public reservoirs across the study area. We selected three random wetlands of each type on each of the three properties, and three random sampling points within each selected wetland with the exception of reservoirs. We randomly selected two 200-m length plots of shoreline in each reservoir and three random points within each plot to sample (Cooper and Anderson 1996, de Szalay et al. 2003, Behney 2020). In total, we deployed 126 traps during each sampling occasion (3 properties x 4 ..., , # North Park, Colorado aquatic macroinvertebrate samples and duck counts

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2280gb61c](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2280gb61c)

Aquatic invertebrate data sampled from North Park, Colorado in 2020 and 2021 and corresponding duck/duckling counts conducted simultaneously.

## Description of the data and file structure

ID: unique sampling location within a site
site: anonymized wetland site of a given habitat type within a property
habitat: wetland type (irrigation ditch, hay meadow, basin wetland, reservoir, or riparian)
week: sampling occasion 
year: 2020 or 2021
property: anonymized landownership - indicates general area of wetland samples
dry: whether the wetland was dry when sampled (1=dry, 0=flooded)
do: dissolved oxygen (%)
temp: temperature (degrees Celsius)
cond: conductivity (µS/cm)
richness: total number of taxonomic groups of invertebrates found within a sample
total.inverts: total number of individuals within a sample across taxonomic groups
energ...