Drying and fragmentation drive the dynamics of resources, consumers and ecosystem functions across aquatic-terrestrial habitats in a river network

Rivers form meta-ecosystems, in which disturbance and connectivity control biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and their interactions – across the river network, but also across connected instream and riparian ecosystems. This aquatic-terrestrial linkage is modified by drying; a disturbance that also naturally fragments river networks and thereby modifies organism dispersal and organic matter (OM) transfers across the river network. However, little evidence of the effects of drying on river network-scale OM cycling exists. Here, we assessed the effects of fragmentation by drying at the river meta-ecosystem scale by monitoring, leaf resource stocks, invertebrate communities, and decomposition rates across three seasons and 20 sites, in the instream and riparian habitats of a river network naturally fragmented by drying. Although instream leaf resource quantity and quality increased, leaf-shredder invertebrate richness and abundance decreased with flow intermittence. Decomposition was ho..., , , # Drying and fragmentation drive the dynamics of resources, consumers and ecosystem functions across aquatic-terrestrial habitats in a river network.

## Description of the data and file structure

The dataset contains four tables containing:

1\) **Invertebrate_data.xlsx**: The taxa-by-sample invertebrate community data used to calculate richness, abundance and community composition,

* This dataset contains the abundance of each taxa collected, sample identity are in rows and taxa names in columns. 1st row = lowest taxonomic level achieved, 2nd row = taxon order or class, 3rd row = taxon family, 4th row = taxon subfamily, 5th row = taxon genera; row 6-125 correspond to taxa abundance within each sample (sorted by site identification number, habitat and sampling campaign).

2\) **Invertebrate_feeding_traits.xlsx**: The trait information used to calculate shredder richness and abundance

* This dataset contains the fuzzy coded trait information with taxa names as rows and feeding ...