RCN: OceanObs Task Team onStimulating Interdisciplinary Cooperation

• Issue – how to facilitate communication and collaboration across disciplines• Why – issues facing society (sustainable coastal

systems, resource extraction, climate change) require interdisciplinary approaches• How – pick an interdisciplinary issue and develop

a team to design a plan for addressing it• Result – provide a discussion paper that outlines

the issues and problems encountered in developing an interdisciplinary program and approaches for resolution

RCN: OceanObs Task Team onStimulating Interdisciplinary Cooperation

• Consider data management barriers and related disciplinary or institutional challenges for integrated interdisciplinary research projects with emphasis on natural-social science collaborations

• Identified potential barriers • disciplinary ‘silos’ of research concepts and associated data management

systems • diversity cultural practices among disciplinary fields • lack of adequate training for data production and management, resulting in

insufficient attention to metadata• lack of resources for data management QA procedures• new challenges resulting from development of new sensors, new data

types, and new resources • lack of recognition and support for truly interdisciplinary research and its

associated data management • conceptual limitation to combine datasets and information from various

sources to create new knowledge• Merging data with different resolutions and quantitative rigor

RCN: OceanObs Task Team onStimulating Interdisciplinary Cooperation

• Questions:• What is needed to facilitate good data

management at the interface of natural and social science that will advance global environmental change research that has sustainability as a goal• What infrastructure and institutional changes are

needed to encourage data exchanges that will promote interdisciplinary or integrated research

RCN: OceanObs Task Team onStimulating Interdisciplinary Cooperation

• Two potential issues to use as case studies for data management, data access, and data exchange that include natural and human science components are:• Marine fisheries management (potential fishery is

Atlantic surfclam)• Ocean acidification

RCN: OceanObs Task Team onStimulating Interdisciplinary Cooperation

• Next steps are to develop a discussion paper that outlines the issues and potential problems with studying a marine fishery and ocean acidification from “end-to-end”• Includes characterizing the natural system,

tracing the effects to humans, and assessing changes in well being • Involves quantitative numerical model outputs to

qualitative narrative survey data – how to merge these is an important constraint

RCN: OceanObs Task Team onStimulating Interdisciplinary Cooperation

• Suggestions for different approaches, case studies are welcome, and data management methods are welcome!