; 5: Illinois Natural History SurveyComputational ecology, defined as the application of computational thinking to ecological problems, has the potential to transform the way ecologists think about the integration of data and models. As the practice is gaining prominence as a way to conduct ecological research, it is important to reflect on what its agenda could be, and how it fits within the broader landscape. In this contribution, we suggest areas in which empirical ecologists, modellers, and the emerging community of computational ecologists could engage in a constructive dialogue to build on one another expertise; specifically, about the need to make predictions from models actionable, about the best standards to represent ecological data, and about the proper ways to credit data collection and data reuse. We discuss how training can be amended to improve computational literacy. . CC-BY 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/150128 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jun. 14, 2017; Computational science happens when algorithms, software, data management practices, and advanced research computing are put in interaction with the explicit goal of solving "complex" problems. Typically, problems are considered complex when they cannot be solved appropriately with mathematical modelling (i.e. the application of mathematical models that are not explicitely grounded into empirical data) or data-collection only. Computational science is one of the ways to practice computational thinking (Papert 1996), i.e. the feedback loop of abstracting a problem to its core mechanisms, expressing a solution in a way that can be automated, and using interactions between simulations and data to refine the original problem or suggest new knowledge. Computational approaches are commonplace in most areas of biology, to the point where one would almost be confident that they represent a viable career path (Bourne 2011). Data usually collected in ecological studies have high variability, and are time-consuming, costly, and demanding to collect. In parallel, many problems lack appropriate formal mathematical formulations, which we need in order to construct strong, testable hypotheses. For these reasons, computational approaches hold great possibilities, notably to further ecological synthesis and help decision-making (Petrovskii & Petrovskaya 2012). Levin (2012) suggested that ecology (and evolutionary biology) should continue their move towards a marriage of theory and data. In addition to the lack of adequately expressed models, this effort is hampered by the fact that data and models are often developed by different groups of scientists, and reconciling both can be difficult. This has been suggested as one of the reasons for which theoretical papers (defined as papers with at least one equation in the main text) experience a sharp deficit in numbers of citations (Fawcett & Higginson 2012); th...