Habitat and Biological Characterization of Mississippi Alluvial Plain Streams in Mississippi, USA.

Highly altered agricultural watersheds like the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (MAP) in Mississippi, USA pose significant challenges for developing biological stressor-response relationships to monitor ecological improvements from best management practices (BMPs). Previous research (Taylor et al., 2023) has indicated that MAP streams have elevated nutrient and ion concentrations as well as reduces biological diversity relative to other regions of Mississippi. These data, collected for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), are part of a joint effort to overcome these challenges and establish biological monitoring and assessment tools for MAP streams based on multiple biological assemblages including macroinvertebrates, diatoms, and bacteria (see DeVilbiss et al., 2023). This data release contains macroinvertebrate, diatom, and stream habitat data collected from stream reaches in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain ecoregion in Mississippi in July-Sept 2021. Diatom community data were collected at 28 sites. Due to habitat limitations at Phillips Bayou, macroinvertebrate community and habitat data were not collected at this site and thus the macroinvertebrate community and habitat datasets contain data from 27 sites. Macroinvertebrate community, diatom community, and habitat data are provided in separate .xlsx files. Diatom and macroinvertebrate community data files are provided in long format and contain site information including USGS site number and waterbody name, collection date, number of counted individual taxa, and Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS)-verified taxonomy. Diatom data also contain fields with biovolume data. Habitat data contain data fields for site name, wetted width, bankful width, bank height, average depth, densiometer, discharge, and corresponding field notes at each site. Corresponding bacterial DNA sequencing data can be accessed at the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Sequence Read Archive (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra) under accession number PRJNA909314. Stream water quality data can be accessed from the National Water Information System. Sediment texture and nutrient data analyzed at the USDA-ARS National Sedimentation Laboratory (Oxford, Mississippi, USA) can be accessed in the supplemental information of DeVilbiss et al., 2023.

Reference List:
Taylor J.M., DeVilbiss S.E., and Hicks M.B. 2023. Using taxa-based approaches to delineate macroinvertebrate assemblage responses to stressor gradients in modified alluvial agroecosystems. Ecol Indic 153. doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2023.110377.
DeVilbiss S.E., Taylor J.M., and Hicks M. 2023. Salinization and sedimentation drive contrasting assembly mechanisms of planktonic and sediment-bound bacterial communities in agricultural streams. Glob Change Biol 29 (19): 5615-5633. doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16905.