Freshwater invertebrates characteristics data

The Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment (FADA) project estimated that
freshwater animal species represent 9.5% of the 1.2 million species
described. Knowing that freshwater represents only 0.01% of the
earth's surface, these wetlands are suitable habitats for a great
part of the world's total biodiversity. However, it has been shown
that there is a lack of knowledge on these species, including freshwater
invertebrates. Nevertheless, they play a key role in the majority of
freshwater ecosystems and in their foodweb networks. Freshwater
invertebrates are the food resource of many species such as fish and
birds. The knowledge of their morphological, energetic and nutritive
characteristics allows a better understanding of their selection by
predators (size, energy intake, etc.), but also lead to improve of wetland
management. Although information about freshwater invertebrates exists in
the literature, they are generally heterogeneous, dispersed and difficult
to collect. To facilitate the accessibility of these data and
thus optimize and accelerate research projects including freshwater
invertebrates, we propose a literature review describing 14 morphological
and nutritive characteristics (size, dry weight, gross energy, crude
protein, etc.) for 656 taxa of freshwater invertebrates. This dataset is
review from 104 publications from 1935 to 2020, compiling 14
characteristics when available (size, dry weight, gross energy, crude
protein, etc.) for 656 taxa of freshwater invertebrates.