Abstract
Abstract. Interdisciplinary science affords new opportunities but also presents new challenges for biogeosciences collaboration. Since 2007, we have conducted site-based interdisciplinary research in central PA, USA, at the Susquehanna Shale Hills critical zone observatory. Early in our collaboration, we realized the need for some best practices that could guide our project team. While we found some guidelines for determining authorship on papers, we found fewer guidelines describing how to collaboratively establish field sites, share instrumentation, share model code, and share data. Thus, we worked as a team to develop a best practices document that is presented here. While this work is based on one large team project, we think many of the themes are universal, and we present our example to provide a building block for improving the function of interdisciplinary biogeoscience science teams.
Highlights
Interdisciplinary science has proliferated in recent decades, resulting in larger science teams drawing on increasingly complex research infrastructure (Lattuca, 2001; Rhoten and Parker, 2004; National Academy of Sciences, 2005; Pearce et al, 2010; Hinckley et al, 2016)
Scientists that would like to initiate new work that is co-located within the bounds of the critical zone observatory (CZO) must propose each idea for installation with the steering committee, the program coordinator, and the field operations specialist, and each installation is typically described for the entire team for comment
It is expected that everyone who works at the CZO will at some time participate in public outreach coordinated by the CZO
Summary
Interdisciplinary science has proliferated in recent decades, resulting in larger science teams drawing on increasingly complex research infrastructure (Lattuca, 2001; Rhoten and Parker, 2004; National Academy of Sciences, 2005; Pearce et al, 2010; Hinckley et al, 2016). Since the mid-2000s, scientists have been viewing this zone through a new interdisciplinary lens that brings together biology, soil science, geology, hydrology, and meteorology to make co-located measurements of chemical and biological transport and transformation that describe past landscape evolution and improve projections of future conditions (Brantley et al, 2017; Sullivan et al, 2019). There are no published guidelines to facilitate the collegial and efficient management of CZ science in the observatory setting, a facilitation that is integral to long-term site-based scientific studies (National Research Council, 2014). 2.1 (co-authorship) has been addressed in some prior publications (Weltzin et al, 2006; Oliver et al, 2018), the major new contributions of this document are the treatment of other aspects of interdisciplinary environmental science, including managing infrastructure, advising students, and sharing model codes and data. Our CZO includes one large watershed, Shavers Creek (165 km2), as well as three nested subcatchments (Brantley et al, 2017, 2018; Li et al, 2018), each with distinct ownership and permitting (see Sect. 2.2)
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