Abstract
Successful management and mitigation of marine challenges depends on cooperation and knowledge sharing which often occurs across culturally diverse geographic regions. Global ocean science collaboration is therefore essential for developing global solutions. Building effective global research networks that can enable collaboration also need to ensure inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches to tackle complex marine socio-ecological challenges. To understand the contribution of interdisciplinary global research networks to solving these complex challenges, we use the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR) project as a case study. We investigated the diversity and characteristics of 1,827 scientists from 11 global regions who were attendees at different IMBeR global science engagement opportunities since 2009. We also determined the role of social science engagement in natural science based regional programmes (using key informants) and identified the potential for enhanced collaboration in the future. Event attendees were predominantly from western Europe, North America, and East Asia. But overall, in the global network, there was growing participation by females, students and early career researchers, and social scientists, thus assisting in moving toward interdisciplinarity in IMBeR research. The mainly natural science oriented regional programmes showed mixed success in engaging and collaborating with social scientists. This was mostly attributed to the largely natural science (i.e., biological, physical) goals and agendas of the programmes, and the lack of institutional support and push to initiate connections with social science. Recognising that social science research may not be relevant to all the aims and activities of all regional programmes, all researchers however, recognised the (potential) benefits of interdisciplinarity, which included broadening scientists’ understanding and perspectives, developing connections and interlinkages, and making science more useful. Pathways to achieve progress in regional programmes fell into four groups: specific funding, events to come together, within-programme-reflections, and social science champions. Future research programmes should have a strategic plan to be truly interdisciplinary, engaging natural and social sciences, as well as aiding early career professionals to actively engage in such programmes.
Highlights
Ocean and coastal resources are critical for human wellbeing and prosperity, but are impacted by increasing anthropogenic pressures that compound natural stresses (Merrie et al, 2014; Inniss et al, 2016)
In an effort to identify and better understand what has worked or not far, in achieving interdisciplinarity in global research networks, we evaluate Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR) as a global network case study
A total of 1,827 scientists from 11 global regions were involved in the 11 IMBeR events (OSCs, IMBIZO’s and Summer Schools) convened by IMBeR since 2009
Summary
Ocean and coastal resources are critical for human wellbeing and prosperity, but are impacted by increasing anthropogenic pressures that compound natural stresses (Merrie et al, 2014; Inniss et al, 2016). Decision-makers address multiple environmental threats to the oceans to ensure effective stewardship including conservation, ecosystem-based management, enabling sustainable resource use, and improving consideration of equitable access (Fulton et al, 2014; Stephenson et al, 2019; Allison et al, 2020; Duarte et al, 2020; Friedman et al, 2020; Narita et al, 2020; Österblom et al, 2020) Addressing these linked socio-ecological challenges effectively (Berkes and Folke, 1998; Colding and Barthel, 2019) requires networking and collaboration that unites sciences and scientists from various disciplines (we focus on social and natural scientists in particular), to understand the problems, develop suitable and equitable solutions, and inform and engage society (Fischer et al, 2011; Ledford, 2015; Viseu, 2015; Crow and Dabars, 2017; Mcdonald et al, 2018; Schäfer et al, 2020). We use a case-study approach focussed on the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR1)
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