Grass Carp diet and environmental data from the Lake Erie and Lake Michigan basins from 2019 to 2022

Data include metabarcoding read data from grass carp associated with the Great Lakes removal program from 2019 to 2022. The anterior portion of the digestive tract was carefully separated from other organs for each captured grass carp and stored in 180 proof non-denatured ethanol. A 25 ml of subsampled gut contents was used for DNA purification and sequencing using polymerase chain reactions. Samples were aligned with a custom ITS2 reference sequence database generated by downloading available ribosomal sequences from the NCBI Nucleotide database on February 5th, 2023. Algae were excluded from the database due to issues in extracting DNA from algae and minimal representation of cyanobacteria in DNA databases. Environmental covariates, such as discharge, number of road crossings, distance to cities, Lake Erie water levels, and temperature were collated based on the capture date of grass carp to assess relationships between diet and the environment. The data set includes grass carp capture and diet information and associated environmental variables. Short reads used for bioinformatic comparison obtained from the carp diets were deposited in the short read archive (SRA) associated with Bioproject PRJNA1304957, SRA Accessions SAMN50579620 - SAMN50580151.