Patos Lagoon estuary and adjacent marine coastal biodiversity long-term data

Estuaries are among the most productive aquatic ecosystems and provide important ecological and economic services in coastal areas. However, estuarine systems have been threatened worldwide by natural and anthropogenic impacts acting on local, regional, and global scales. Long-term ecological studies contribute to the understanding and management of estuarine functioning and provide the baseline information for detection changes and modeling of predictive scenarios. Here, we describe long-term data on the biodiversity and physico-chemical parameters obtained from 1993 to 2016 for the Patos Lagoon estuary and adjacent marine coast (PLEA), in southern Brazil. We report 8 datasets containing 6972 sampling events with the occurrence and abundance records of 275 species (kingdoms: Bacteria, Protozoa, Chromista, Plantae, and Animalia) of functional groups plankton, benthos, and nekton. Datasets also include 22 190 abiotic records. The database is published in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) repository (see Sect. 3 "Data availability" and Table 3). The present compendium represents one of the most comprehensive and longest datasets from primary producers to top predators in an estuarine coastal system in South America, and their availability will be an important contribution to the understanding and predictability of estuarine dynamics around the world.