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. 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.