Challenge: Unprecedented anthropogenic pressures, including climate change and urbanization, are putting ecological research at the center of efforts to maintain ecosystem services supporting human and other life. In this capacity, ecology is increasingly becoming a predictive and scalable science. However, the transition is hampered as most ecologists do not make use of novel opportunities to integrate existing data across scales (temporal, geographic, taxonomic, etc). To add to the challenge, much of the ecological research remains unused, as we have recently identified (No time to waste - let's reduce research waste in ecology | Research Communities by Springer Nature). Therefore, it is pressing to drastically empower ecological research.

Solution: EcoOpen is developing solutions to reduce unused research and foster scientific breakthroughs by facilitating the uptake of a rich landscape of existing ecologically relevant information. We  will do this by capitalizing on both the global momentum of meta-research (research on research) and open science developments.

How: EcoOpen is developing protocols, tools, and methods for the use of open data and other open science artifacts in evidence synthesis and broader. To guide their development, we use a meta-research approach. Meta-research (or research on research) is a burgeoning interdisciplinary research line that investigates the scientific system itself in order to optimize it. Specifically, we will quantify the benefits of open science artifacts and the technical and social barriers to their use, building cost-benefit models. We will then demonstrate the benefits of the developed tools by addressing several fundamental questions in ecology (e.g. how extreme events affect biodiversity) on a global scale, using state-of-the-art approaches to evidence synthesis.

Vision: Tools developed in EcoOpen will foster scientific breakthroughs in ecology. Results of EcoOpen have the potential to inform scientific reform. Finally, the project will allow me to establish the first meta-research group that focuses on ecology, further strengthening Croatia's position in a global scientific landscape.

More detailed information about the EcoOpen project (https://osf.io/6va9b/)