A curated global checklist of polychaetes (Annelida) from deep‑sea chemosynthetic and reducing habitats

Deep‑sea chemosynthetic and reducing habitats, including hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, methane seeps, whale falls, wood falls, organic falls and other reducing sedimentary environments, represent key systems for deep‑sea biodiversity research. Polychaetes are a species‑rich and taxonomically well‑studied benthic group in these environments. However, relevant records are scattered across taxonomic papers, regional surveys, ecological studies, monographs, reviews and databases. No dedicated global dataset is currently available with unified taxonomic validation, habitat coding and literature provenance. This paper introduces a publicly released curated global checklist dataset of polychaetes from deep‑sea chemosynthetic and reducing habitats (version 1.0.1). Compiled from published literature, the dataset harmonises scientific names, accepted names under the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), AphiaIDs, LSIDs and taxonomic status. The dataset is archived on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22011206) and contains 368 checklist‑level taxonomic records, amongst which 363 records are included in core statistics according to the 'includeInCoreStatistics' field. It provides taxonomic hierarchies, WoRMS identifiers, standardised and raw habitat descriptions, locality information, source references, plus taxonomic and ecological notes. Supplementary materials include a reference table, habitat controlled vocabulary, field dictionary, README, CITATION file, licence and version history. The dataset supports taxonomic syntheses, global‑ or regional‑scale biodiversity overviews, broad‑scale habitat‑association analyses and subsequent compilation of occurrence‑level data. It is not suitable for fine‑scale species distribution modelling, station‑level community analyses or sampling‑effort‑corrected richness estimation.