Wastewater treatment plant contaminant profiles affect macroinvertebrate sludge degradation: data

These files contain the data used in the manuscript: Wastewater treatment plant contaminant profiles affect macroinvertebrate sludge degradation. We assessed the sludge degradation potential of (combinations of) multiple macroinvertebrate taxa on sludge with different contaminant profiles. We hypothesized that, in sludges with a higher contaminant load, sludge degradation would decrease less in treatments with multiple macroinvertebrate taxa, compared to treatments with only single taxa. We did do two experiments: one with sludges from three different WWTPs, of which we characterized the contaminant profiles; and one in which we experimentally spiked a sludge with Cu. Macroinvertebrates were able to increase sludge degradation in most treatments, but was taxa and WWTP plant specific. In the sludge with the hihgest contaminant load, higher than expected sludge degradation in multiple taxa treatments was observed. The same was observed in the Cu-spike experiment, in which sludge degradetion was higher than expected at intermediate Cu concentrations. The data consists of four excel files: one for the experiment with multiple WWTP sludges, one for the characterization of the sludge contaminant profiles, one for the Cu-spike experiment, and one for the callibration lines of the macroinvertebrate length-DW relation.