The Turkey Lakes Watershed (TLW) Study was established in 1979 by several federal government departments (Natural Resources Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada) to study the impacts of acid rain on aquatic and forest ecosystems but has since expanded to include other research on toxic contaminants, forest harvesting, habitat modification, and climate change. The TLW is a mixed hardwood forest with a 10.5 km squared area in the Canada Shield that drains into Lake Superior, and has been the focus of many interdisciplinary, whole-ecosystem studies on environmental issues.
Benthic invertebrates, or insects found at the bottom of waterbodies, can be key indicators of stream health and play important roles in nutrient cycling and the food chain. In 1995, a project within the TLW aimed to evaluate how stream ecosystems respond to tree harvesting, which involved long-term surveys of benthic invertebrate communities pre- and post-harvest. Three stream catchments (c31, c33, c34) were harvested at different intensities in the summer of 1997 and were compared to multiple undisturbed catchments. Alongside the invertebrate data, corresponding stream habitat surveys, streamside litterfall traps, leaf decomposition, deposition of stream particulate matter, and standing sediment bedload data was collected during the same period. The data was collected from 1995-2009 by researchers at the Canadian Forest Service (Great Lakes Forestry Centre).
This dataset is a rare and valuable resource because there are very few existing long-term datasets of benthic invertebrates from the same locations, and because this dataset is integrated with other biological and chemical datasets within the broader TLW database stored at the Open Government data repository. For an overview of other types of data available from the TLW, see https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.14109, and for a complete list of publications that have been produced from data collected at this site, see https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/turkey-lakes-watershed-study/publications.html.