Ecology, the science of the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings, and its relevance to society are in a period of rapid change. As a society, we are becoming increasingly globalized, while at the same time facing a growing number of environmental challenges, many of which are international in scope and extent. At the same time, our ability to measure and monitor the world around us has changed dramatically, both through technology development, such as remote sensing, automated instrumentation and high-throughput DNA sequencing, and through the establishment of both top-down observatories and bottom-up research networks. Data is more open and interconnected and these changes are fundamentally shifting the questions we can address in ecological science. The time is ripe to shift from conception to actively building international research collaborations that span international boundaries, ecological scale and observation systems. A workshop will be held in Arizona during February to bring together world leaders from the US, Canada, Australia, Mexico and South Africa in large scale ecological science. The workshop will investigate three major themes: 1) From data networks to knowledge networks, 2) ecological forecasting, and 3) training, education and outreach.