Large scale, open data, and a big tent: Advancing macrosystems ecology through collaboration, transparency, and inclusion

This Special Feature examines how macrosystems ecology advances understanding of ecological patterns and processes that operate across nested spatial, temporal, and organizational scales, from microsite to continent. This Special Feature synthesizes 10 contributions spanning freshwater and terrestrial systems, plants and animals, and methods development through empirical synthesis, showing that continental observational networks (e.g., NEON, USA‐NPN) and coordinated citizen science enable questions no single team or dataset could address alone. These studies reveal that ecological patterns are strongly scale‐ and assemblage‐dependent, that trait‐based and intraspecific approaches increasingly complement species‐level descriptions, and that open software tools and shared leadership models are as essential as the data themselves. Collectively, the papers highlight three lessons: cross‐scale linkages are the unit of analysis in macrosystems ecology; trait distributions provide a natural currency for cross‐scale and cross‐continent comparison; and the data revolution is inseparable from a parallel revolution in how teams collaborate, communicate, and engage the public. The collection calls for cross‐network synthesis across continents, operationalization of CARE principles alongside FAIR norms, translation of continental‐scale findings into actionable science, and structural investment in the next generation of macrosystems ecologists. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.