*Limitations and Future Opportunities*

It is important to acknowledge several limitations. One limitation relates to the authors' personal preferences, which could have influenced the selection of studies reviewed in this paper. In some cases, several papers addressed the same or similar issues, and the final selection could have been swayed by the authors' own research interests or unconscious preferences for a certain methodology, despite a thorough review of the final included papers and all authors' consensus. All papers using the EDI are listed on the EDI bibliography website, which is constantly updated and may be easily reviewed by readers. We have not included in this review research including indigenous children, since our author team did not include indigenous members. We recognize that this is a limitation and aspire to rectify this in future reviews. Finally, the focus of this review has been on potentially unique contributions of population-based measurements of child development to inform policy-making in order to enhance children's optimal functioning. However, a population-based lens is not a substitute for in-depth, developmental, longitudinal child development studies or evaluation studies of early interventions; rather, the different disciplinary lenses ideally complement and inform each other. We anticipate that future developmental research that draws from population-level data linkages may be able to integrate population-level data on child development at different stages of the life course and eventually follow child cohorts intergenerationally—involving comprehensive data on children's social context (e.g., family, community, school, socioeconomic factors, policy) and also measured during different life periods (e.g., childhood, youth, adulthood). Such comprehensive socioecological, developmental, population-based monitoring and data linkages would realize the type of developmental science that has been proposed by Urie Bronfenbrenner, in his influential formulation of the "bioecologial model of human development". In fact, this trend is already noticeable in the EDI literature, as the papers using individual-level linkages between EDI and other data sources constitute 59% of articles published within the past five years.
