Bringing ecology into focus at multiple scales and resolutions

Ecology has made great scientific progress by building a collaborative culture that values the synthesis of existing data to reveal generalizable patterns at regional, continental and even global scales. Data integration across taxa has provided insights into population and community level response to environment, and in fundamentals of organismal metabolism. Integration of data generated through disparate methodologies has allowed the analysis of global patterns in ecosystem properties and processes. Ecology has also widely embraced interdisciplinary collaboration in order to understand the interplay of observed ecological phenomena with climate and socioeconomic dynamics. While ecology continues to scale up its spatial and disciplinary breadth in order to address urgent environmental issues, revolutionary advances also are occurring at molecular and cellular scales of biological organization that may be key to transforming ecology into a more predictive science. As we seek to understand patterns observed at the level of ecosystem and beyond, simultaneous molecular approaches can help to tell us not only who is there but what they are doing. Integration of knowledge, technologies, and data that span from ‘omics to remote sensing could provide the key to understanding the biological processes that create large scale pattern. Yet such integration remains rare. Realization of this vision for research integration will require new training opportunities not only in technologies underlying biological discovery at disparate scales, but also in the tools and skills that facilitate collaboration.