Long-term dataset on aquatic responses to concurrent climate change and recovery from acidification

Abstract

Concurrent regional and global environmental changes are affecting freshwater ecosystems. Decadal-scale data on lake ecosystems that can describe processes affected by these changes are important as multiple stressors often interact to alter the trajectory of key ecological phenomena in complex ways. Due to the practical challenges associated with long-term data collections, the majority of existing long-term data sets focus on only a small number of lakes or few response variables. Here we present physical, chemical, and biological data from 28 lakes in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York State. These data span the period from 1994-2012 and harmonize multiple open and as-yet unpublished data sources. The dataset creation is reproducible and transparent; R code and all original files used to create the dataset are provided in an appendix. This dataset will be useful for examining ecological change in lakes undergoing multiple stressors.

Figure 1. Location of study sites.

The 28 study lakes (purple points) are located in the southwestern and south-central Adirondack Park (outlined in blue). Inset shows park location within New York, United States.

Figure 2. Workflow diagram for data cleaning and harmonization.

Input files on the far left, R code scripts in the grey boxes and output files (.csv format) are on the right. Information on the output files can be found in Table 3. All original data files and scripts to re-create each file are available at Data Citation 1.