Publication
The global EPTO database: Worldwide occurrences of aquatic insects
Publisher:
Wiley
Date:
10-03-2023
DOI:
10.1111/GEB.13648
Abstract: Aquatic insects comprise 64% of freshwater animal ersity and are widely used as bioindicators to assess water quality impairment and freshwater ecosystem health, as well as to test ecological hypotheses. Despite their importance, a comprehensive, global database of aquatic insect occurrences for mapping freshwater bio ersity in macroecological studies and applied freshwater research is missing. We aim to fill this gap and present the Global EPTO Database , which includes worldwide geo‐referenced aquatic insect occurrence records for four major taxa groups: Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera and Odonata (EPTO). A total of 8,368,467 occurrence records globally, of which 8,319,689 (99%) are publicly available. The records are attributed to the corresponding drainage basin and sub‐catchment based on the Hydrography90m dataset and are accompanied by the elevation value, the freshwater ecoregion and the protection status of their location. The database covers the global extent, with 86% of the observation records having coordinates with at least four decimal digits (11.1 m precision at the equator) in the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84) coordinate reference system. S ling years span from 1951 to 2021. Ninety‐nine percent of the records have information on the year of the observation, 95% on the year and month, while 94% have a complete date. In the case of seven sub‐datasets, exact dates can be retrieved upon communication with the data contributors. Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera and Odonata, standardized at the genus taxonomic level. We provide species names for 7,727,980 (93%) records without further taxonomic verification. The entire tab‐separated value (.csv) database can be downloaded and visualized at roject/epto_database/ . Fifty in idual datasets are also available at fred.igb‐berlin.de , while six datasets have restricted access. For the latter, we share metadata and the contact details of the authors.