Addressing today’s environmental challenges requires that we change the ways that we do science, harness the enormity of existing data, and develop new approaches to managing, publishing and sharing data. In this webinar, Professor William Michener will: -- provide a historical overview of data management and data sharing, focusing on lessons learned from past and emerging large ecological and environmental research programs (i.e., “big ecology”) -- review some of the current impediments to data management, publication and sharing -- discuss solutions to these challenges including various tools that support management of data throughout the data life cycle from planning through analysis -- explore new approaches to publishing and sharing data such as the Dryad digital repository and DataONE. -- glimpse into a future vision for how informatics can better enable science, highlighting some of the activities that are underway with respect to changing the scientific culture (e.g., altmetrics, semantic annotation and provenance tracking). Professor William (Bill) Michener Project Director for DataONE — a US National Science Foundation project that supports cyberinfrastructure development and community engagement for the biological, environmental, and Earth sciences. He presently serves as Editor for the Ecological Society of America’s Ecological Archives, Associate Editor for Ecological Informatics, Board chair for Dryad Digital Repository, and Board member for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Organization for Tropical Studies, and the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP).