Provenance: Can I trust this result?

The digital revolution has seen a dramatic increase not only in the quantity and accessibility of ecological data, in the power of analytical tools, and in opportunities for synthesis, but also in the complexity of analyses that scientists perform. Software tools that collect and use provenance help promote trust and transparency in the face of this complexity. By recording details of the environment, inputs, and outputs, such tools help ensure reproducibility; by recording intermediate data values, they facilitate troubleshooting; and by recording execution pathways, they can simplify analyses to include only those steps required to produce a particular result.