Forest inventory data, providing ground-source information of forest characteristics and history across the globe are essential for a variety of stakeholders to achieve sustainable forest management. Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative (GFBI) is an international multi-stakeholder team of foresters and forest scientists assembling such globally-scattered forest inventory data to support cutting-edge research and policymaking (https://www.gfbinitiative.org/). Under GFBI and other international platforms, the power of gathered tree-level data and professionals has yielded remarkable outputs and contributed significantly to the forest and ecological communities in the past years. This workshop consists of two sections. The first section will be an introduction to GFBI; how the GFBI data looks like, what attributes are available, how GFBI standardizes the data, how to get access to the data, and how to contribute your forest data to GFBI. In the second half, we present the past research examples of GFBI and discuss how GFBI data can be utilized for ecological research. We will specifically focus on the values of ground-source forest data over remotely sensed data, and how to process such large datasets in R. We welcome a broad audience and interactive discussion to discern the unique setting of collective forest inventory data and to move ecological research based on forest inventory data forward with innovative ideas. Note: Purdue High-Performance Computing node access will be provided to the workshop participants for free. To register, please email <aota@purdue.edu> with your name, affiliation, and email address.