RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Synthetic datasets and community tools for the rapid testing of ecological hypotheses JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 021402 DO 10.1101/021402 A1 Timothée Poisot A1 Dominique Gravel A1 Shawn Leroux A1 Spencer A. Wood A1 Marie-Josée Fortin A1 Benjamin Baiser A1 Alyssa R. Cirtwill A1 Miguel B. Araújo A1 Daniel B. Stouffer YR 2015 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/06/23/021402.abstract AB The increased availability of both open ecological data, and software to interact with it, allows to rapidly collect and integrate data over large spatial and taxonomic scales. This offers the opportunity to address macroecological questions in a cost-effective way. In this contribution, we illustrate this approach by forecasting the structure of a stream food web at the global scale. In so doing, we highlight the most salient issues needing to be addressed before this approach can be used with a high degree of confidence.