Despite deep learning being state of the art for data‐driven model predictions, its application in ecology is currently subject to two important constraints: (i) deep‐learning methods are powerful in data‐rich regimes, but in ecology data are typically sparse; and (ii) deep‐learning models are black‐box methods and inferring the processes they represent are non‐trivial to elicit. Process‐based (= mechanistic) models are not co...