Insights from the synthesis of long-term biodiversity data: resources and tools available to community ecologists

The growing availability of FAIR (finable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) long-term data is providing new and exciting opportunities for ecologists to assess trends in biodiversity. However, there are many hurdles for scientists who want to use these resources. Here we summarize challenges we have experienced during our synthesis of long-term biodiversity data to assess metacommunity stability across Long Term Ecological Research sites. In particular, we will discuss tools and resources that are available and/or in development for discovering, accessing, and analyzing long-term data sets that may be useful to ecologists who want to explore trends in biodiversity at multiple scales.