Understanding ecological patterns and processes that take place over both long time scales (centuries, millenia, and millions of years) and large spatial scales (regional, continental and global) has, until recently, been limited by the availability and coverage of sufficient high-quality data. Long-term ecological time series are increasingly common, but are often dispersed, difficult to access, and/or challenging to synthesize due to differences in data collection or curation. To address this issue, research communities are building open-source macro-scale scientific databases, curated by communities of experts, to concentrate and standardize data. These joint sociotechnological advances in ecoinformatics infrastructure and community norms is paving the way for a new generation of synthetic ecological research that integrates across large spatial and temporal scales and allow us to test long-standing ecological questions that arise across different sub disciplines of ecology. Expert-oriented ecoinformatics unites ecological research goals with information resources by concentrating large quantities of expert-generated data from different sources, improving access, standardizing data, and increasing research reproducibility and transparency. In this session, we highlight current research that is using ecoinformatics and “big data” from expert-curated databases to test ecological theory, particularly theories that focus on the macro-scale dynamics of communities over time and space. Our goal is to emphasize new analytical approaches for big data, emerging databases and database technology, synthesis across data types, novel application of existing data, and new insights into addresses macro-scale community dynamics in space and time. We bring together speakers who are both using and developing expert-curated databases to address large scale macroecological patterns and processes. Our session emphasizes a variety of open-access databases that are being used or developed for temporal ecological research, across timescales from decades to millennia. The broader scientific goal is to understand the dynamic processes that govern community composition and biodiversity patterns across environmental variations in time and space, which is increasingly important in this modern period of accelerated change.