ABSTRACT:

The 2021 emergence of the 17-year Brood X cicadas saw billions of cicadas emerge from the soil throughout the Midwestern and Eastern United States, leaving soil surface holes and burrows with unknown consequences for local and regional hydrology. The goal of the project was to examine the influence of the cicada emergence eon soil water infiltration, namely saturated hydraulic conductivity in and around Bloomington, Indiana, which was the epicenter for the Brood X emergence. The data contained here is all of the data from this work, and contains saturated hydraulic conductivity time series from 89 sites as well initial soil water contents. We took measurements in disturbed and undisturbed areas, where we defined disturbed areas as areas without human disturbance since the last Brood X emergence that occurred in 2004.