Integrative ecology in the era of big data—From observation to prediction

Most ecological and environmental issues faced by human society can only be solved at the ecosystem, watershed, regional and even global scale. Thus, ecological research is developing rapidly towards macro-scale studies. With the rapid development of observational networks and information technology, the spaceborne-aircraft-ground based observation system is becoming an important feature of ecosystem monitoring in the new era. With the gradual formation of the global new-generation observational systems and the rapid expansion of massive multi-source heterogeneous data, ecology has entered the era of big data, big science, and big theory. How to integrate ecological big data, discover valuable ecological laws and mechanisms, and further expand them to solve eco-environmental issues that closely relate to human development are the major opportunities and challenges in this field. In this paper, we systematically summarized the research progresses in ecological big data, reviewed the opportunity and demand of integrative ecology, and further discussed the main approaches of ecological big data integration by using meta-analysis, data mining, and data-model fusion. Finally, we proposed the prospects and research directions of in-tegrative ecology and suggested that future researches need to integrate big data into land models so as to improve the accuracy of ecological forecasting. It can be foreseen that under the background of global change and the rapid development of big data in the future, integrative ecology will be extensively applied and developed to serve the sustainable development of human society.