Freshwater ecologists have unprecedented opportunity to work at increasingly large spatial scales and across more heterogeneous data resources, and to inform water management from local to continental scales. Historically freshwater ecologists have generated a wide variety of high-value data, such as long-term data on individual lakes. Now this community seeks to amplify the impact of these data through collaborations that incorporate data from remote sensing, in situ instruments, meteorological and climate data, and watershed land use information.
Results/Conclusions
Collaboration across globally distributed aquatic ecosystems has yielded new insights on topics ranging from drivers of global lake warming to the importance of winter for lake ecology. To fully realize the potential of synthesis in an increasingly data rich environment, freshwater scientists will continue to benefit from changing attitudes that favor collaboration and data sharing, as well as greater access to training for data-intensive research approaches. Even as we make progress in these important areas, significant technological hurdles remain in freshwater science. Data synthesis shows major data gaps for water across the globe. Most water bodies are too small for effective widespread monitoring with existing remote sensing and in situ instrumentation, and the translation of these technologies from terrestrial or marine environments to freshwater is not always straight-forward. Thus the next knowledge revolution for freshwater ecology and management will require much closer collaboration between those developing technologies and aquatic scientists driven by questions of fundamental importance for science and management.