Chemical and physical data of water and its evolution over incubation experiments for three headwater streams in the Conwy catchment, North Wales (2014)

These data are chemical and physical data of stream water and their evolution over incubation experiments conducted on water samples taken from three headwater streams from the Conwy catchment in North Wales. Incubations involved different treatments, controlled light exposure, sterilization, and nutrient enrichment (nitrogen and phosphorus). The measured parameters are concentrations of organic carbon, total nitrogen, and major anions and cations and parameters such as pH, electrical conductivity, and absorbance. Samples were collected on two occasions for each stream between May 2014 and September 2014. Five litres of water sample were collected on the field and brought back to the laboratory for six-day incubations. Incubation started immediately after sampling. Incubation experiments were conducted in the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology laboratory, Bangor, United Kingdom. Incubations were carried out in a Bangor University laboratory using an experimental set-up built for allowing the control of light exposure. Analyses were performed in the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) laboratory. The different treatments involved samples being kept in the dark or exposed to controlled light; additionally between 6 to 12 light-exposed samples were poisoned with Mercury(II) chloride (HgCl2) or enriched with nutrients (Nitrogen as nitrate, Phosphorus as phosphate or both). The data were collected to understand the fate of dissolved organic carbon in headwater streams depending on its sources, nature and on the inorganic nutrients availability in the headwater streams. When there was a doubt on the values, the analysis was redone, all values in the database have been validated. The sampling, incubations and analyses where performed by Ophelie Fovet, L'Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) Rennes, L'Unité mixte de Recherche Sol Agro et hydrosystèmes Spatialisation (UMR SAS), France and co-ordinated by Chris Evans, CEH Bangor, Wales, UK. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/eeffacad-1f23-456a-aac0-1bda40958f75