Human activities are drastically altering the planet’s biosphere, leading to an unprecedented biodiversity crisis 1, 2••. To better understand the human footprint on biological diversity, it is necessary to expand the traditional toolkit of biodiversity research. This expansion is underway via the rapid development and application of omics tools such as genomics (the study of DNA), transcriptomics (RNA), proteomics (proteins), epigenomics (chemical marks on the genome), metabolomics (metabolites), and meta-omics (community-level metagenomics and metatranscriptomics). This omics revolution is transforming environmental sciences — an issue that has been thoroughly reviewed elsewhere 3, 4, 5••, 6. Yet, it is less clear how these tools have been leveraged to address the most important challenges facing biodiversity, particularly in tropical environments, which host the largest portion of the Earth’s biodiversity.