Branch of ecology that fuses multiple ecological processes and integrates multi-scale ecological cognition from organism, community, ecosystem, region to the globe scale.It uses multisource heterogeneous data, including remote sensing, longterm ecosystem network observation, and global change manipulative experiments, and applies meta-analysis, data mining, and data-model fusion methods to reveal the general patterns and mechanisms underlying ecological response at the global scale. Source: Integrative ecology in the era of big data (Niu et al, 2020) [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-020-9664-6]