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ABSTRACT Understanding animal movement is at the core of ecology, evolution and conservation science. Big data approaches for animal tracking have facilitated impactful synthesis research on spatial biology and behavior in ecologically important and human-impacted regions. Similarly, databases of animal traits (e.g. body size, limb length, locomotion method, lifespan) have been used for a wide range of comparative questions, with emerging data being shared at the level of individuals and populations. Here, we argue that the proliferation of both types of publicly available data creates exciting opportunities to unlock new avenues of research, such as spatial planning and ecological forecasting. We assessed the feasibility of combining animal tracking and trait databases to develop and test hypotheses across geographic, temporal and biological allometric scales. We identified multiple research questions addressing performance and distribution constraints that could be answered by integrating trait and tracking data. For example, how do physiological (e.g. metabolic rates) and biomechanical traits (e.g. limb length, locomotion form) influence migration distances? We illustrate the potential of our framework with three case studies that effectively integrate trait and tracking data for comparative research. An important challenge ahead is the lack of taxonomic and spatial overlap in trait and tracking databases. We identify critical next steps for future integration of tracking and trait databases, with the most impactful being open and interlinked individual-level data. Coordinated efforts to combine trait and tracking databases will accelerate global ecological and evolutionary insights and inform conservation and management decisions in our changing world. 

Long‐term studies are critical for ecological understanding, but they are underutilized as inclusive opportunities for training ecologists. We use our perspective from the Año Nuevo elephant seal programme along with surveys from community members to propose that long‐term studies could be better leveraged to promote inclusive education and professional development in ecology. Drawing on our experiences as mentors and mentees, we demonstrate how long‐term studies can use their resources, including rich data, robust logistics and extensive professional networks, to improve recruitment and retention of diverse groups of trainees. However, practices such as unpaid labour and unclear expectations limit the utility of these resources for diversifying ecology. We discuss how we have structured our long‐term study to create more inclusive and equitable training opportunities. Acknowledging these transformations required substantial resources, we highlight funding sources and organizational partnerships that can promote investment in long‐term studies for broadening participation. 

The open ocean twilight zone holds most of the global fish biomass but is poorly understood owing to difficulties of measuring subsurface ecosystem processes at scale. We demonstrate that a wide-ranging carnivore—the northern elephant seal—can serve as an ecosystem sentinel for the twilight zone. We link ocean basin–scale foraging success with oceanographic indices to estimate twilight zone fish abundance five decades into the past, and into the future. We discovered that a small variation in maternal foraging success amplified into larger changes in offspring body mass and enormous variation in first-year survival and recruitment. Worsening oceanographic conditions could shift predator population trajectories from current growth to sharp declines. As ocean integrators, wide-ranging predators could reveal impacts of future anthropogenic change on open ocean ecosystems.