Water chemistry and sediment core data from small, shallow lakes of the Taiga Plains (Northwest Territories, Canada)

Lake browning has been widely projected for northern lakes affected by permafrost thaw, but the inherent heterogeneity in permafrost landscapes coupled with a paucity of data for many regions makes it challenging to develop circumpolar-scale assessments. This dataset provides surface water chemistry from 35 small, shallow (0.5-3 m) lakes in discontinuous permafrost peatlands of the Taiga Plains (Northwest Territories, Canada), which were distributed across two Level IV ecoregions (Cameron Uplands, Tathlina Plain). This dataset also provides a comparison subfossil diatom assemblages between present-day (2012-2018) and ~1850 in 23 Taiga Plains lakes distributed across three Level IV ecoregions (Cameron Uplands, Tathlina Plain, South Mackenzie Plain).