Data of environmental characteristics and brown trout populations in 102 Norwegian hydropower reservoirs

The data contains field-collected data of brown trout populations in 102 Norwegian reservoirs with variable environmental characteristics. The brown trout data (i.e. response variables) include estimates of: "Biomass" (grams of fish per 100m2 net per night); "Density" (number of fish per 100m2 net per night); "Mean weight" (mean wet mass in grams); "Mean condition" (mean Fulton's condition factor); and "Mean maturity length" (mean total length of mature females in millimeters). All abbreviations for different variables (columns) are explained in the paper. Many reservoirs ("Lake") have various names, some including Norwegian letters (æ, ø & å). Hence, we recommend to use coordinate data (EPSG:4326; "decimalLongitude" and "decimalLatitude") and Norwegian national lake ID numbers ("Lake_nr"; managed by the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate; www.nve.no) to locate the reservoirs. The variables "Year", "Month" and "Day" refer to times when survey fishing was conducted. Lake morphometry data ("A"=surface area, "SD"=shoreline development) is obtained from NVE database. The lake climatic and catchment data ("T"=mean July air temperature, "NDVI"= Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, and "SL"=terrain slope) is obtained and measured as described by Finstad et al. (2014; DOI: 10.1111/ele.12201). Other abbreviations include: "FC"=presence of other fish species (1=absent, 2=present); "GS"=gillnet series (1=Nordic, 2=Jensen); and "ST"=brown trout stocking (0=no stocking, 1=stocking). The water level regulation (WLR) metrics include: ): "WLR_magnitude"= maximum regulation amplitude; "WLR_frequency"=relative proportion of weeks with a sudden rise or drop in water level; and "WLR_duration"=the relative proportion of weeks with exceptionally low water levels