Lather, rinse, reuse - Are our archived data valuable or all wet?

Ecology is in the midst of a data revolution, and data archiving has gone mainstream as a means to facilitate data reuse. But are more data always better? Grappling with heterogeneous, missing, and/or low-quality data is frustrating for researchers, and makes it difficult to synthesize data across sites and systems. Here, we highlight progress by members of the Global Lakes Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) to embrace data management and storage best practices, develop workflows for reusing “sub-optimal” data, and thus use existing datasets to answer new, cross-site ecological questions.