Summary Report¹ of the Workshop on
Enhancing Integrated Science

Integration among sciences is critical in order to address some of our most pressing and complex scientific and environmental problems, now and in the future. The complex nature of natural ecosystems, and the increasingly complex nature of human stresses and demands on ecosystems, means that simple and narrowly focused approaches are not sufficient to penetrate modern environmental problems. This increasing need for interdisciplinary science also poses new and important demands on the scientific enterprise, and on mission-oriented research institutions. The central question for institutions is how to promote and enhance interdisciplinary science efforts.

Purpose

The purpose of this workshop² was threefold: (1) identify the social, scientific, and administrative environments that lead to successful collaboration and integration; (2) develop a set of guiding principles for the conduct of integrated scientific endeavors; and (3) make recommendations to the U.S. Geological Survey and the scientific community at large on strategies to promote interaction and integration of disciplines (biological, physical, and social) for a more adequate understanding of complex natural systems.

There were 24 invited workshop participants with representation from government agencies, academia, and private industry. A list of participants is provided in Appendix 1. The first day of the workshop centered on:

• the need for the scientific community to more explicitly consider the integrated nature of both natural systems and modern environmental problems;

• scientists' perspectives on the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities for integrating the sciences;

• end-users' perspectives on the value of and need for synthesized, integrated information from the scientific community;

• lessons learned (see Appendix 2) from interdisciplinary projects presented through 6 case studies; and

• a look at the collaborative culture from a social scientist's perspective.

Day two focused on developing a set of guiding principles for integrated scientific efforts that emerged from the discussion on day one, and recommendations for USGS and the scientific community at large.

The Interdisciplinary Model

Operational definitions employed in this report are based on Gilbert, 1998³ and a synthesis of discussions in the first day of the workshop by Gilbert, May and Marzolf. In this model, scientific endeavors are viewed on a continuum, moving from disciplinary to interdisciplinary, from depth to breadth, and from analytic to synthetic goals. Specifically:

• Disciplinary science may be characterized by singular efforts within a well-defined specialization. The goal of disciplinary science is a deep understanding of a single problem or a single aspect of a problem. Though a disciplinary effort may involve many scientists, and the scope of the analysis may be broad, it will still employ the methods and theories of a single discipline.

• Multidisciplinary science is an additive approach that combines the efforts of more than one discipline. Multidisciplinary efforts seek to combine the results of specialized, disciplinary approaches for a broader understanding of a problem or question. Cooperation among contributors is necessary.

• Interdisciplinary science is a cumulative approach that synthesizes the perspectives of the individual disciplines and integrates during all phases of the approach to a question or problem. It differs from multidisciplinary science in that integration is required. This may allow new questions to emerge as the problem is further defined. Consequently, the results of interdisciplinary efforts may be emergent as well. True collaboration, beyond mere cooperation, is essential to successful interdisciplinary science.

The potential similarities between interdisciplinary investigations and the systems they are trying to understand makes such approaches particularly attractive with respect to highly integrated, complex and dynamic natural and artificial systems⁴. Such systems often display behaviors that are difficult to predict due to interconnections across several spatial and temporal scales and between sub-systems that can span several disciplinary frameworks. Multidisciplinary efforts can begin to articulate the scales and disciplinary distribution of the problem at hand; interdisciplinary approaches are required to understand the relationships among the range of problem elements from the outset.

The best interdisciplinary science is still limited in its ability to yield fully predictive explanations. The necessary ambiguity of interdisciplinary explanations does not have to mean the absence of rigor. The depth and rigor of the participating disciplines is an integral feature of interdisciplinary science that helps offset the limitations in complex explanations. As the disciplinary breadth of our interdisciplinary efforts increases so too will our understanding of the inherent limits in predictability. Including the social sciences and their methodologies dealing explicitly with ambiguity is an important feature of interdisciplinary science.

The nature of interdisciplinary science offers opportunities that may be exploited and capitalized upon to a greater degree than in either the disciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches. The results of workshop discussions suggest that interdisciplinary science offers the opportunity to:

1. Exploit the attributes of the spatial and temporal continua.

   Complex systems that occur at small scales and over short-time intervals are likely to yield more data, and therefore more statistically significant results and deeper understandings. At larger scales, over longer-time intervals, data are more inclusive and therefore results and explanations are likely to be broader and more complete.

2. Exploit ambiguity.

   Ambiguity can point to areas where additional research efforts will be most effective. Exploit institutional ambiguity--it may be an indication of a relaxation of constraints and it may suggest that innovative work can be done in the absence of a decree that it can't be done.

3. Capitalize on social sciences in dealing with ambiguity.

   The social sciences have a long history of working with uncertainty. Their models include "messy variables" associated with human behavior.

4. Exploit disciplinary science.

   Science has moved through an era of increasing specialization, yielding deep understandings and highly specialized methodologies. The goal of interdisciplinary science is not to undo history, but to build on the foundation that specialization provides. By doing so, and by honing our skills at synthesis, we can derive new, synthetic explanations and understandings that are critical to addressing complex questions and problems.

5. Span the boundaries through collaboration.

   Interaction among and across the disciplines can occur in any number of ways. There are a number of models that are practiced and shown in Appendix 3.

   The principals in a true collaboration represent complementary domains of expertise. As collaborators, they not only plan, decide, and act jointly, they also think together, combining independent conceptual schemes to create original frameworks. Also, in a true collaboration, there is a commitment to shared resources, power, and talent: no individual's point of view dominates, authority for decisions and actions resides in the group, and work products reflect a blending of all participants' contributions⁵.

In summary, we are looking for a willful redirection of our evolutionary trajectory as the greater community called SCIENCE. The following set of principles for the conduct of interdisciplinary science endeavors are offered to the science community for further discourse, debate, and refinement.

Interdisciplinary science seeks to:

• recognize the interdependence of science and societal concerns,

• value all disciplines (social and natural) and honor the validity of each other's work,

• use approaches to understanding natural systems that are as integrative as natural systems are themselves,

• illuminate the complexity and interdependency of the natural world,

• develop rigor and breadth from the strengths of the participating disciplines,

• provide an adaptable approach in which teams are organized explicitly to address scientific questions and/or societal concerns,

• share common vision, authority, responsibility, accountability, trust, and ownership of the endeavor, and

• provide a framework that can communicate knowledge and understanding in a relevant, timely, and accessible manner to society.

With the principles for interdisciplinary science as the foundation, the following recommendations are offered to the USGS and the broader scientific community as a means of "enhancing integrated science".

U.S. Geological Survey

• Alter the way scientific research is administered and supported. Initiate the process of integrating the organization and changing the budget structure to focus on issues rather than division or discipline lines. Establish an agency-wide multiyear budget. Uniform divisional overhead and cost accounting systems are essential for successful integration.

• Accelerate the establishment of issue oriented teams by setting aside a portion of the budget as venture capital for competition among interdisciplinary teams. Establish a fair and creative process to encourage teams to develop proposals for consideration. Reward teams, not individuals for the products these teams produce.

• Establish a panel of external advisors (drawn from the social, economic, political and scientific communities) to provide guidance to the Director for allocating resources to implement interdisciplinary scientific endeavors and fostering interdivisional research and collaboration. See diagram in Appendix 4.

• Continue to support the disciplines and other enabling sciences (including monitoring) that are the foundation for interdisciplinary/integrated efforts.

• Redesign the incentives and rewards system, including the Research Grade Evaluation Guide to: value collaborative, interdisciplinary scientific endeavors and reward teams; reward behaviors conducive to successful collaboration; reinvigorate the workforce in approaches to science through rotational assignments, sabbaticals, education and retraining; allow scientists to achieve potential in interdisciplinary science; and reward interdisciplinary scientific leadership.

• Fully utilize new means of communication (e.g., world wide web), to better link scientists within the USGS, to distribute agency products, and to enhance the relationship with local, regional, and national customers and obtain their feedback.

• Allocate time and resources to include the end user during the problem definition, planning and/or research design, and assessment phases of an interdisciplinary scientific endeavor.

Scientific Community at Large

• Identify new ways to communicate information--explicitly explore use of the World Wide Web. Increasingly there will be data sets produced through teams of people at various time/spatial scales that should be accessible and usable, locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.

• Develop Knowledge Maps. This recommendation is intended to result in a "Yellow Pages" of who is working on what where.

• Identify "Story Tellers" with credibility and charisma in the scientific community. These individuals should convey a sense of excitement and generate enthusiasm among scientists and the public for successful integrated scientific efforts. This recommendation is intended to begin to provide a history of experiences with the issues/questions investigated, who was chosen inside and outside science to participate, and what works and does not work in the interdisciplinary, collaborative environment.

• Promote and support sabbaticals/details/ exchanges within, between and among the academic, government and industry science institutions to encourage the exchange of thinkers, thinking and ideas. Constant cross-fertilization is viewed as opportunity to be productive scientifically in another environment. This kind of opportunity should be open to managers, technicians, etc., for as short a time as a week to a year or more.

• Stress the importance of cooperative integrated learning.

• Create a Presidential award to recognize a group doing integrated science that has had the greatest impact.

• Through community/town hall meetings learn about problems or what are perceived problems that need to be addressed.

Conclusion

The U.S. Geological Survey has the advantage of a broad range of programmatic scientific opportunities that require an interdisciplinary, integrated approach. The outcomes from this workshop, provide a number of suggested approaches that tackle the institutional and cultural adjustments needed to enhance the conduct of interdisciplinary science. The enthusiasm and interest of participants for future discussion will result in the establishment of a self-directed cohort group. Additionally, to sustain momentum, ideas for an action plan are offered in Appendix 5 to move forward in the community with continued debate, discussion, and finally implementation of workshop results and recommendations.