Absolutely. There are a few excellent projects in this vein, as well - where deeper investment in data gathering, done in ways to optimize its broad use in research, is occurring.

An example is the National Science Foundation NEON project, which is a long-term ecological monitoring initiative with common field methodologies across 81 North American sites. https://www.neonscience.org/

Huh. I weirdly enough have worked with a lot of those sites from the remote sensing side, but never really know what the overall project was. Just "use the NEON sites for examples". I should have looked it up more at the time. Thanks for sharing!