The fundamental role of periphyton in supplying dietary energy to alpine streams food webs: current knowledge and future perspectives.

Benthic periphyton is a fundamental resource in stream food webs as it provides consumers with easily digestible carbon and nutrients, including polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), essential for consumers growth and reproduction. Periphyton is particularly important in alpine streams above the tree line where the terrestrial subsidies are limited. However, research has shown that it has a key role also in subalpine streams due to its high nutritional quality. This dataset has been created to support a literature review conducted on the topics of periphyton abundance (biomass) and nutritional quality (measured as PUFA content) in alpine and subalpine streams. It contains data on the number of published studies on these topics per year, their geographic locations, and periphyton biomass measurements in alpine glacial and non-glacial streams extracted from selected studies.