Big data and the future of ecology

Abstract

The need for sound ecological science has escalated alongside the rise of the information age and “big data” across all sectors of society. Big data generally refer to massive volumes of data not readily handled by the usual data tools and practices and present unprecedented opportunities for advancing science and informing resource management through data‐intensive approaches. The era of big data need not be propelled only by “big science” – the term used to describe large‐scale efforts that have had mixed success in the individual‐driven culture of ecology. Collectively, ecologists already have big data to bolster the scientific effort – a large volume of distributed, high‐value information – but many simply fail to contribute. We encourage ecologists to join the larger scientific community in global initiatives to address major scientific and societal problems by bringing their distributed data to the table and harnessing its collective power. The scientists who contribute such information will be at the forefront of socially relevant science – but will they be ecologists?

Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools

“…There is ongoing and important work by the informatics com munity on the architecture and systems for data management and archiving 7,8,18,74 , as well as efforts to enable scientists to publish the code that they do have 26,31,52 . This work is critical, but comes with the a priori assumption that scientists are already thinking about data and coding in a way that they would seek out further resources.…”

Navigating the unfolding open data landscape in ecology and evolution

“…The number of scientific data repositories and data journals (and consequently the amount of open data) has dramatically increased in recent years largely as a result of recent efforts (for example, journal and funder policies on data archiving 4,6 ) to enable a transparent, reproducible and efficient science where the previous work is preserved, and can easily be reused, validated and built upon 4,11,18,19 . Archiving data in repositories, or publishing them in an article form in the data journals, are two of the best venues to achieve long-term, findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data (FAIR data 6,11,20,21 ).…”

“…Ecological and evolutionary data are scattered across a large number of community specific and general repositories at present 4 , because the culture of data sharing in these fields has started relatively recently, and because the data types and methods used to obtain these data are extremely diverse 3,4,6,17 . Locating the relevant data in this fragmented landscape is today partly mitigated by the places that harvest these primary data sources (that is, collect information) and provide one interface to search for data sets of interest (Fig.…”

“…Facilitated by recent advances in internet technologies and tools, and statistical approaches 2 , these openly available data are beginning to provide unparalleled insights into complex systems. As scientific fields that are motivated by the search for unifying mechanisms, ecology and evolution inherently lend themselves to the value of open data [3][4][5][6] . Yet, until now, the application of open data has not pervaded these natural sciences [6][7][8] .…”

The game-changing potential of digitalization for sustainability: possibilities, perils, and pathways

“…Digitalization has (positively as well as negatively) incalculable potential to help achieve sustainability of the planetary and human system, or at least help reduce the negative impact of people. ICT and Big Data can help promote sustainability (Gijzen 2013;Hampton et al 2013), because the societal complexity of the planetary nervous system is strongly connected and these systems may lead to cascading effects that increase vulnerability (Helbing 2012). Via a big data-driven "transnational sustainability agency" (Seele 2016b) or a digital "global participatory platform", for instance, digitalization can help increase (strong) sustainability in the environmental, social and economic spheres (Helbing 2012).…”