Data and code supporting the manuscript 'Human impact on microinvertebrate diversity and distributions: questioning the resilience of tardigrades'

Data and code supporting the manuscript 'Human impact on microinvertebrate diversity and distributions: questioning the resilience of tardigrades' by Bartłomiej Surmacz, Krystian Budzik, Yelyzaveta Matsko & Daniel Stec. Our study is a high-throughput DNA metabarcoding survey of tardigrade communities across habitats with different levels of human impact, employing an exceptionally high sampling effort. Our data indicate a clear link between anthropogenic impact and decreased taxonomic richness of tardigrades. Using generalized dissimilarity modelling, we found that human impact is also a major factor shaping tardigrade beta diversity across the study area. The tardigrade fauna of anthropogenic landscapes does not comprise a constant, homogeneous set of human-associated taxa. Instead, anthropogenic environments are more likely to support more divergent communities, often including ‘widespread’ species (i.e., found in more than one biogeographic realm), suggesting a potential role of human-mediated dispersal in shaping the broad distribution ranges of microinvertebrates.This research was funded by the Preludium programme of the National Science Centre, Poland; grant no. 2022/45/N/NZ8/01992