In an era of rapid global change, our ability to understand and predict Earth's natural systems is lagging behind our ability to monitor and measure changes in the biosphere. Bottlenecks to informing models with observations have reduced our capacity to fully exploit the growing volume and variety of available data. Here, we take a critical look at the information infrastructure that connects ecosystem modeling and measurement...

Forests play an influential role in the global carbon (C) cycle, storing roughly half of terrestrial C and annually exchanging with the atmosphere more than five times the carbon dioxide ( CO 2 ) emitted by anthropogenic activities. Yet, scaling up from field‐based measurements of forest C stocks and fluxes to understand global scale C cycling and its climate sensitivity remains an important challenge. Tens of thousands of for...

Tropical forests play a critical role in the global carbon (C) cycle, storing ~45% of terrestrial C and constituting the largest component of the terrestrial C sink. Despite their central importance to the global C cycle, their ecosystem‐level C cycles are not as well‐characterized as those of extra‐tropical forests, and knowledge gaps hamper efforts to quantify C budgets across the tropics and to model tropical forest‐climate...