Data from: Freshwater ecological quality assessment of the gold mining Mashcon watershed, Cajamarca - Peru

These data were generated to investigate the aquatic community gradients
across different types of anthropogenic impacts (reference, mining, rural
and urban) and Andean environmental gradients (headwaters, midstream and
downstream) in the Mashcon watershed.  The
macroinvertebrates' taxa abundance and abundance of traits modalities
serve as biological values. The latter in combination with abiotic
measurements of the freshwater habitats (i.e. physicochemical water
quality and hydromorphology) constitute the ecological data. The values
were obtained from river sediments (macroinvertebrates collection), water
samples for laboratory analyses, field protocols and in-situ water quality
measurements at 40 sites, wherein 6 were downstream of the gold mine’s
artificially recharged headwaters, 8 sites at near-pristine headwaters
tributary streams, 14 sites at midstream rural areas and 12 sites at
downstream urban areas (sample grouping information is shown in the
Field_protocol.xlsx file).