Data standards, protocols, and tools for gathering, documenting, and exchanging ecological data are crucial to sharing knowledge and resources on a global scale. Effective data management depends on the use of data standards and protocols to make high-quality data easy to find, access, share, and use. Despite challenges that still exist in data management and ecological data sharing, there have been significant advances made in recent years due to the adoption of standards and protocols among organizations. It is highly important that ecologists understand how standards and protocols can benefit themselves, the ecological community, and other science disciplines. In this information age, data sharing has become the norm. The Global Biodiversity Facility (GBIF), the Global Invasive Species Information Network (GISIN), the National Biological Information Infrastructure, and the U.S. Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, manage and share data and metadata, taking ecological and information science to new levels. The standards, protocols, and tools developed by these networks can only be tested through their application to real-world datasets. As ecologists adopt and implement the products of these and other networks, they can achieve increased data integration and contribute more robust datasets for better science. This oral session has been organized to introduce and illustrate the importance of data standards, protocols, and tools by showing how their use benefits global ecological research. The symposium will open by addressing how developments in taxonomic work have benefited global information sharing. This is followed by presentations about the use or application of standards such as the Federal Geographic Data Committee Standard, the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) Biocomplexity Thesaurus, the Global Invasive Species Information Network (GISIN) Protocol, and Ecological Metadata Language (EML). Each of these standards describe scientific data sets in a consistent format and are a valuable way for scientists and researchers to discover and share completed or ongoing research projects in a particular area of study. Innovative ways of finding and using that information will be highlighted using specific examples. Finally, the presenters will demonstrate new ways in which standards, protocols, controlled vocabularies, and taxonomies are being used to facilitate and enhance broader data sharing on a global level – which benefits ecological understanding in this age of increased access to data and information.