Check out Sydne’s latest paper that describes how to best confront metacommunity theory with long-term data streams. This paper also highlights a new data standard (i.e., ecocomDP) for community ecology generated through a collaboration with the Environmental Data Initiative that has the potential to make synthesis of disparate datasets easier. Keep an eye out for more papers on this topic coming out later this year introducing the data design standard and applying ecocomDP to data from the National Ecological Observatory Network. This work was funded by the NSF through a Long Term Ecological Research Network synthesis working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.