Human impacts mediate freshwater invertebrate community responses to and recovery from drought

Drought is an increasing risk to the biodiversity within rivers—ecosystems that are already impacted by human activities. However, the long-term spatially replicated studies needed to generate an understanding of how anthropogenic stressors alter ecological responses to drought are lacking. We studied aquatic invertebrate communities in 2500 samples collected from 179 sites on rivers emerging from England’s chalk aquifer over three decades. We tested two sets of alternative hypotheses describing responses to and recovery from drought in interaction with human impacts affecting water quality, fine sediment, water temperature, channel morphology, flow, and temporal change in land use. We summarized communities using taxa richness, an index indicating tolerance of anthropogenic degradation (average score per taxon, ASPT), and deviation from the average composition. Responses to drought were altered by interactions with human impacts. Poor water quality exacerbated drought-driven reductions..., Data was collected from several databases from the Environment Agency. Data was mostly processed in R., , # Human impacts mediate freshwater invertebrate community responses to and recovery from drought

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3r2280gr8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3r2280gr8)

## Description of the data and file structure

The data is divided into two sheets, one containing the biological response variables and the other one containing environmental predictors (including hydrological and human impact variables).

The first column (A) of each sheet has a unique sample ID which can be used to link both sheets. A unique Site ID (Column C) and sample date (Column B) are also provided in both sheets. Rows represent unique samples.

**In the sheet \"Biological responses\"**:

Column D: Richness i.e., the number of invertebrate families in each sample

Column E: distance to the community centroid as described in the main manuscript

Column F: abundance-weighted ‘WHPT’ average score per taxon (ASPT): WHPT-ASPT, a biomonitoring index that reflects responses to organic pollution and general e...