Cite this dataset: Liao, W. (2020). Dataset of diving beetle (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae) diversity enhanced by emergent plants in urban wetlands (Version 1). Wenfei Liao. http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:att:bf4e811f-23f9-4024-b799-9d000bb249dc The data is associated with the article: Liao, Wenfei, Stephen Venn, and Jari Niemelä (2023). "Microhabitats with emergent plants counterbalance the negative effects of fish presence on diving beetle (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae) diversity in urban ponds." Global Ecology and Conservation 41: e02361. This dataset contains data that allows us to investigate how the quantity of spatial refuges affects the diversity of aquatic invertebrates in aquatic ecosystems and generate reliable management recommendations for biodiversity conservation. The spatial refuges in this study are emergent plants, the cover of which was estimated at the pond level and at the microhabitat level (1m×1m plots with an activity trap as the centre of the plot). The column "VegeCover" gives the estimated cover of emergent plants, while "VegeSpecies" gives the information of emergent plant species richness. We measured the water depth at the microhabitat level to investigate how water depth affects emergent plant cover, which is recorded in the column "WaterDepth". We sampled diving beetles (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae), an indicator taxa for rapid biodiversity assessment, with 1-L activity traps operated horizentally in water for 48 hours. We recorded the species richness and abundance of dytiscids in each trap. The column "DySpeciesRichness" is the species richness of dytiscids, and "DyAbundance" is the abundance of dytiscids. We also confirmed the presence or absence of fish in our study ponds by operating a fish trap for 24 hours. All fish species were predatory. The column "Fish" gives information on the presence ("YES") or absence ("NO") of predatory fish. We collected the data during summers in 2018 and 2019. The dataset has been saved as two csv files. "Dy_Vege_Pond.csv" is the file for data at the pond level, while "Dy_Vege_Microhabitats.csv" is the file for data at the microhabitat level.

2020