Abstract. 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.