Datasets of 30 freshwater lakes including macroinvertebrate data and explanatory data

Understanding the distance-decay relationship (DDR) has been considered important because it reflects a combination of several ecological processes such as dispersal limitation and environmental sorting. However, the effects of human disturbances on DDR are poorly known, especially in freshwater lakes. To fill this gap, we used datasets across 30 freshwater lakes in the Yangtze River floodplain to examine how anthropogenic eutrophication modified the relationships between three facets (taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic) and three measures (overall dissimilarity, turnover, and nestedness-resultant components) of macroinvertebrate beta diversity and geographic and environmental distances. The datasets include macroinvertebrate data and explanatory data in the 30 freshwater lakes.