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The goal of this data collection was to compile diverse existing data in order to summarize and contrast ecologically relevant parameters in lakes during ice-on (winter) and ice-free (summer stratification) periods. There are 89 unique lakes in this dataset, ranging from small, shallow lakes to large, deep lakes. Lakes are from eleven different countries, primarily in North America and Europe; Antarctica is the only southern hemisphere location represented in the dataset. Variables collected include physical, chemical, and biological, as well as a suite of metadata variables. Chlorophyll a data are particularly well-represented across lakes, while many variables (e.g. zooplankton variables) are only available for a smaller subset of lakes. Temporal coverage for unique lake/sample stations range from one year to a span of 73 years, with 20 lake/stations having at least 30 years of data.Synthesis analyses based on this dataset are available in: Hampton et al. (2016). Ecology under lake ice. Ecology Letters. doi: 10.1111/ele.12699. It must be stressed that the data here are not raw values from the original sampling, but aggregated values, based on varying initial sampling efforts and protocols, calculated by individual researchers. Please carefully review Supplemental Document S1 and the methods described in Hampton et al. (2016) for detailed information about how data were collected and aggregated, as well as units associated with each variable.