  New technologies for acquiring biological information such as eDNA, acoustic
or optical sensors, make it possible to generate spatial community observations
at unprecedented scales. The potential of these novel community data to
standardize community observations at high spatial, temporal, and taxonomic
resolution and at large spatial scale ('many rows and many columns') has been
widely discussed, but so far, there has been little integration of these data
with ecological models and theory. Here, we review these developments and
highlight emerging solutions, focusing on statistical methods for analyzing
novel community data, in particular joint species distribution models; the new
ecological questions that can be answered with these data; and the potential
implications of these developments for policy and conservation.
