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Description: This project contains the data and code used to analyse and report on an experiment testing the effect of increased surface complexity of wood on in-stream macroinvertebrate assemblages across streams with varying degrees of catchment-scale urban impact (White and Walsh, 2020 Ecological Applications https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2199). We used a hierarchical multi-taxon model to assess differences in abundance of taxa between two types of wood surface in streams with catchments ranging from forested to fully urban. We were particularly interested in the potential interaction between surface complexity and urban impact. Increased surface complexity increased abundance of most taxa, but this effect was less pronounced in urban streams, partly because of the reduced species pool tolerant of urban stormwater impacts, and partly because of a lesser response of some species to increased complexity in more urban streams. Collectively these taxon-specific effects resulted in small, uncertain increases in taxon richness with increased complexity in rural streams, and no change in richness of the less diverse assemblages of urban streams. The data are in 4 related tables (sites, samples, biota, taxonomy) in the worksheet WhiteWalsh_data.xlsx, with fields and relationships defined in the metadata table. Code for the multi-taxon model is contained in the RMarkdown document WhiteWalsh_S1.Rmd, which was used to produce Supplementary material S1 for the paper. Similarly, WhiteWalsh_S2.Rmd was used to produce Supplementary material S2. Code producing the figures of the paper are contained in WhiteWalshMethodsFigures.Rmd. Code for the map in Fig. 1 is also provided (WhiteWalshFig1Map.R), but the spatial data that it uses are not.