Lake, wetland, and stream biotic and abiotic properties from the National Aquatic Resource Surveys

Broad-scale studies of freshwaters have improved our understanding about how biotic and abiotic processes will respond to ecosystem change and environmental threats such as climate, depletion of natural resources, and contamination of air and water. Although we know that hydrologic connections between freshwater ecosystems are important for many biotic and abiotic processes, lakes, wetlands, and streams are typically studied in isolation of one another at broad scales. These data were compiled at the US conterminous scale using the Environmental Protection Agencyâ s National Aquatic Resource Surveys that includes sample sites from 3 datasets: the 2012 National Lakes Assessment (NLA), the 2011 National Wetland Condition Assessment (only the freshwater wetlands were selected) (NWCA), and the 2008-2009 National Rivers and Streams Assessment (NRSA). Such datasets can provide a large volume of data across a wide study extent spanning multiple spatial scales and provide new opportunities to quantify and understand ecosystem processes and patterns at broad-scales. The goal of our dataset was to compare drivers and spatial structure of freshwater properties across lakes, wetlands, and streams at macroscales. The finished database contains information on abiotic properties (e.g. TP, TN) and biotic properties (e.g. chlorophyll-a, aquatic vegetation, macroinvertebrate complexity) of over 3,000 waterbodies and their associated landscape context characteristics (e.g. land use/cover, climate). This database could continue to be used for holistic studies that cross ecosystem types and also combined with other data to improve broad-scale understanding, management, and inference.