Diversity and environmental data sets for Multitrophic alpha and beta diversity of lake plankton across Canada

The file “MTI_ENVdata.xlsx” contains environmental variables from 559 sampled as part of the NSERC Canadian Lake Pulse Network project over three summers (2017-2018-2019). Lake morphometry variables were either measured on site (lake depth), or obtained from HydroLAKES v. 1.0 (Messager et al. 2016). Water quality variables (water physical and chemical properties) were collected or measured at the deepest point of each lake, following the protocols from the NSERC Canadian Lake Pulse Network (2021). Watershed land use fractions were characterized for each lake, as described by Huot et al. (2019). Variables sampling depth and units are described in “metadata_variables.xlsx”. Annual mean air temperature was obtained using WorldClim version 2.1 climate data for the years 1970-2000. The file "MTI_DIVERSITYdata.csv" contains bacterio-, phyto- and zooplankton richness, shannond diversity and local contribution to diversity (LCBD) indices calculated in 559 lakes across canada. The 'simple' approach used specnumber from the library vegan to compute richness, the function diversity in vegan for Shannon diversity and the function beta.div from the library adespatial for LCBD. In the 'threshold' method, diversity was calculated separately for each taxonomic order of bacterio-, phyto-, or zooplankton, and then compared with the maximum richness observed for that order across all lakes. Then, for any given lake, the number of orders that reached 30 % of maximum diversity were tallied, with X being an empirically derived threshold. Simple and threshold multitrophic richness and LCBD was calculated by scaling and then averaging values for each group. References Huot, Y., C. A. Brown, G. Potvin, and others. 2019. The NSERC Canadian Lake Pulse Network: A national assessment of lake health providing science for water management in a changing climate. Sci. Total Environ. 695: 133668. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.133668 Messager, M. L., B. Lehner, G. Grill, I. Nedeva, and O. Schmitt. 2016. Estimating the volume and age of water stored in global lakes using a geo-statistical approach. Nat. Commun. 7: 1–11. doi:10.1038/ncomms13603 NSERC Canadian Lake Pulse Network. 2021. NSERC Canadian Lake Pulse Network field manual 2017 - 2018 - 2019 surveys, M.-P. Varin, M.-L. Beaulieu, and Y. Huot [eds.]. Université de Sherbrooke.