Habitat heterogeneity overrides local processes to drive the species-area relationship of benthic macroinvertebrates in shallow floodplain lakes

The species–area relationship (SAR) on islands describes how the numbers of species increase with increasing island size (or island-like habitat, such as lakes). Despite its conceptual importance, there is considerable uncertainty surrounding its shape in freshwater lakes, as well as the potential mechanisms that underlie the SAR. Here, we used standardized sampling data of benthic macroinvertebrates from 81 shallow lakes in the Yangtze-Huai floodplain of China to evaluate its shape and disentangle several mechanisms (e.g., passive sampling, colonization-extinction dynamics and heterogeneity) underlying the SAR. At the whole-lake level, we found an increase in the total species richness with increasing lake area, as well as an increase in rarefied richness controlling for sampling effort. However, within single samples, diversity was negatively related to lake area. This scale-dependence is because within-lake&nb..., , # Habitat heterogeneity overrides local processes to drive the species-area relationship of benthic macroinvertebrates in shallow floodplain lakes

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.41ns1rnrx](10.5061/dryad.41ns1rnrx)

## Description of the data and file structure

In this study, we used standardized sampling data of benthic macroinvertebrates from 81 shallow lakes in the Yangtze-Huai floodplain of China to evaluate their shape and disentangle several mechanisms (e.g., passive sampling, colonization-extinction dynamics and heterogeneity) underlying the SAR.

The files contains two kinds of data: Macroinvertebrate community (comm_dyrad.csv) and Environment (env_dyrad.csv).  

The community data showed species density at each sampling site of each lake. The unit is individuals per square meter (ind. / m2).  

The environment data contains: 

sampling time, lake name, lake location (latitute °N and longnitute °E), lake area (km2), lake mean depth (m), total nitrogen (mg/L), total phosphorus (mg/...,