In the last few years, it has been understood that nice moduli spaces can be “tropicalized” via modular maps which allow to study many properties of the original spaces by looking at their tropical counterpart. In particular, following the breakthrough work by Chan Galatius and Payne in the case of the moduli space of curves, it is often possible to compute part of the cohomology of the original space by computing the homology of the link of  the tropicalized moduli space. Often, a first step is to give a tropical interpretation to combinatorial data used to compactify. In the talk, I will try to explain this interplay in the case of (universal) Jacobians and, time permitting, the moduli space of abelian varieties.