This pandemic condition makes us clear that human activities and well-being strongly dependent on the health of the global environment and are fully integrated with ecosystem functioning and services. We need to rethink the way we model and manage our ecological and economic systems to better address the sustainable use of natural resources. The ability to predict the ecological consequences of the way we manage natural resources is now essential to address policies and decision-making. Although in the past, ecological models did not often contribute to such predictions (Schuwirth et al. 2019), there is now urgency to use them for practical applications. The current epidemiological crisis, linked to global environmental degradation, shows us that indiscriminate exploitation and poorly supported management can be detrimental to ecosystems, other species, and our society. Nowadays, humanity has available several modelling approaches (e.g. machine learning, mechanistic and statistical models, etc.) that can be used to predict the response of ecosystems to anthropogenic impacts (Getz et al., 2018). Nonetheless, theoretical models unsupported by empirical data and field validation frequently led to either poor predictability or over parameterization, which resulted in catastrophic Nature degradation and misunderstanding about the actual utility of ecological models (Pilkey and Pilkey-Jarvis 2007).