Legacy effects of four decades of insecticide applications on contemporary benthic macroinvertebrates in eastern Canadian rivers

<p>These files support the manuscript "Legacy effects of four decades of insecticide applications on contemporary riverine benthic macroinvertebrates," which has been published in&nbsp;<em>Environmental Pollution </em>(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2025.126397). This manuscript evaluates the relative importance of historical insecticide applications and modern environmental variables in explaining benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages at 274 sites across the province of New Brunswick, Canada.</p> <p>No new data was generated for the work described in this manuscript. Historical insecticide application data for the province of New Brunswick were taken from Heartz et al. 2023 (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4068">https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4068</a>), and benthic macroinvertebrate data were downloaded from the publicly available CABIN database (<a href="https://open.canada.ca/data">https://open.canada.ca/data</a>, record ID 13564ca4-e330-40a5-9521-bfb1be767147). The authors cannot make their compiled data set publicly available because the subset of CABIN data used for this analysis includes privately maintained data that are only available upon request from respective stakeholders. Please contact the corresponding author for guidance on obtaining these data directly from CABIN.&nbsp;</p> <p>The attached files include</p> <ul> <li><strong>analysis_R_scripts</strong>: All R codes required to reproduce our analysis. <ul> <li><em>01_cabin_prep_BMI_data</em> cleans the CABIN benthic macroinvertebrate data for analysis.</li> <li><em>02_cabin_prep_env_data</em> cleans the CABIN site-level environmental data for analysis.</li> <li><em>03_pesticide_etl_calculation</em> calculates the estimated toxicity load (ETL) in each reach and catchment we studied.&nbsp;</li> <li><em>04_ pesticide_apps_per_year</em> calculates the number of years each insecticide was applied in each reach and catchment we studied.</li> <li><em>05_site_year_selection_script</em> subsets the CABIN data to include only one observation per site and calculates univariate indices (e.g., %EPT) for each site.</li> <li><em>06_data_merge_for_analysis</em> compiles all data (insecticide applications and environmental variables at the reach and catchment scales + CABIN macroinvertebrate and site-level environmental data)</li> <li><em>07_univariate_analysis</em> performs multiple regression analysis with the merged data.</li> <li><em>08_mulivariate_analysis_familydata</em> performs PCA and RDA analysis with the merged data.</li> <li><em>09_misc_figures</em> renders figures used in the manuscript text.</li> <li><em>10_site_year_selection_100x</em> loops over script #5 100x to confirm that our results were robust to data subsetting and imputation.</li> <li><em>11_data_merge_100x</em> loops over script #6 100x to confirm that our results were robust to data subsetting and imputation.</li> <li><em>12_univariate_analysis_100x</em> loops over script #7 100x to confirm that our results were robust to data subsetting and imputation.</li> </ul> </li> </ul>