Ecology has become the most promising science capable of addressing important societal concerns, such as the loss of biodiversity, protecting of ecosystem services, or securing food provisioning. During the last decades, the data collected in the field under various ecological disciplines have slowly but surely found their way into databanks. These databanks are starting to become fully open access. Some examples include the GenBank, the IUCN red species list, BIEN, GBIF, COMPADRE & COMADRE, or MoveBank, among others. The open-access into these global repositories has recently provided ecologists with the volume of data and technical resources necessary to make global predictions on how ecosystems will react to climate change. However, some important challenges lay still ahead to allow us to explore general patterns and responses in ecology using these data: interoperability, reproducibility and informatics support are but a few.
Results/Conclusions
The father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, once said "I’m not interested in your data; I’m interested in merging your data with other data. Your data will never be as exciting as what I can merge it with”. Ecologists must look beyond the utilization of a single database to address ecological questions, as ecological questions are multifaceted and multidisciplinary. How can we do so? Here I will propose a decalogue of good practices by individual contributors and database curators to move from the era of big data towards the era of big integrated data.