Freshwater insect occurrences and traits for the contiguous United States, 2001 - 2018

Freshwater insects comprise 60% of the diversity of freshwater animals and are essential indicators of ecosystem health. Yet our knowledge of the distribution of freshwater insect diversity in the United States is incomplete because we lack comprehensive data on freshwater insect distributions and traits at a continental scale. We fill this knowledge gap by presenting a database of occurrence records and functional traits for freshwater insects in the contiguous US. We compiled over 2.05 million genus occurrence records for 932 genera in the major freshwater insect orders, at 51,044 stream locations sampled between 2001 and 2018 by federal and state biological monitoring programs. We assembled life history, dispersal, morphology, and ecology traits from existing databases, scientific books, and the primary literature, and present traits and trait affinities for 1,072 insect genera. Our freshwater insects CONUS database can be used to map freshwater insect taxonomic and functional diversity, and when paired with environmental data, will provide a powerful resource for quantifying how the environment shapes diversity patterns as well as taxon-specific distributions across the contiguous US.