Feng, Xiao; Huijie Qiao and Brain J. Enquist
Many science disciplines are witnessing marked increases in the volume and variety of data collected, analyzed, and stored (Khoury and Ioannidis 2014). Ecology has also inevitably entered the era of “big data” (Hampton et al. 2013), with large datasets from museum collections (Constable et al. 2010), citizen-science programs (Sullivan et al. 2014), environmental sensors, and remote-sensing platforms (Toth and Jóźków 2016). Ecological science is increasingly asked to make more data- driven predictions at different temporal and spatial scales (Dietze et al. 2018).