Ecology has become an increasingly data-intensive science in recent decades as synthesis and collaborative observation networks have expanded the potential scale and scope of questions that can be asked beyond what a single researcher can accomplish on their own. Although this year marks the 40^th birthday of the Long Term Ecological Research and the ForestGEO Networks, and the Organization of Biological Field Stations is over 30 year old, the strides in ecological data collection by observatory networks have not diminished the challenges of synthesizing ecological data across space and time to make novel discoveries. Indeed, the ecoinformatics landscapes of these (and other) networks are constantly shifting. In the early 1980s, sites produced kilobytes of data manually entered into computers, whereas today sensors automatically compile gigabytes-to-terabytes of data daily. In the face of these ecoinformatics challenges, educating the next generation of ecologists with today’s best practices for data curation, management, and sharing, and pushing research frontiers in data science (for ecologists) is imperative. This session highlights innovations in data-science research, education, and use across coordinated research networks collecting ecological ‘big data’ to meet these ecoinformatics challenges. Methods in Ecology and Evolution (MEE) and Wiley are co-sponsoring this session to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of MEE, a journal dedicated to the promotion of new methods (including data science applications) in ecology and evolution by facilitating their dissemination and uptake by the research community. Co-organizer Record is an Associate Editor of MEE, and Co-Organizer and Moderator Ellison is a Senior Editor of MEE.