Embracing the diversity of open data in ecology: Challenges, opportunities, and recommendations

As FAIR data principles have gained traction in ecology, decades of observations of species counts, habitat characteristics, geochemical concentrations, and meteorological measurements from a diverse variety of ecosystems are becoming increasingly available, presenting new opportunities and challenges for ecologists. Here I report on lessons learned from experience as both a data provider (perspective as a data scientist at NEON) and a data re-user (perspective as a participant in LTER synthesis groups). Overall, the survival and utility of long-term data streams will rely on coordination and feedback between primary data collectors and data users as they develop tools and standards.