UC Santa Barbara

Ecology is evolving rapidly and increasingly changing into a more open, accountable, interdisciplinary, collaborative and data-intensive science. Discovering, integrating and analyzing massive amounts of heterogeneous data are central to ecology as researchers address complex ques- tions at scales from the gene to the biosphere. Ecoinfor- matics offers tools and approaches for managing ecological data and transforming the data into informa- tion and knowledge. Here, we review the state-of-the-art and recent advances in ecoinformatics that can benefit ecologists and environmental scientists as they tackle increasingly challenging questions that require volumi- nous amounts of data across disciplines and scales of space and time. We also highlight the challenges and opportunities that remain.