The continual cataloging and investigation of environmental microbial communities is critical as a basis for understanding our planet and its biogeochemical cycles. However, while new catalogue style publications do present their work in context of a few other studies, a holistic view would provide more robust contextualization. Here we present an overview of 820 freshwater microbial metagenomes and their typical: functional genomic content, community membership, and community networks. We present evidence on which potential functional components are taxonomically redundant, and which taxa have functional redundancy, highlighting functions and taxa with low redundancy. Further, by comparison of this data to community networks we identify those taxa which through cooperation are critical to stability of aquatic communities. The setting of baseline parameters of freshwater aquatic microbial communities by analysing a very large raw-dataset (compared to a review style meta-analysis) with current best practice methodology will enhance the robustness of future works within this field and spur discussion on deeper ecological and methodological issues.