The Interdisciplinary Challenge: Academic Perspective

Interdisciplinary research can be compared to the ancient craft of weaving a fishnet. The knot used for this net is obviously important. The quality, size and form of the final product depends on the skill of the weavers, the choices they make in the design and their ability to picture how the different components will come together to form a useful whole. By analogy, when conducting a large, multidisciplinary project, the scientific methods (the knots), the skills of the scientists (the weavers), the initial choices made for the project design, and the scientists’ collective ability to integrate their findings across disciplines to form a synthesized whole, will determine the quality, number and form of the final products. In the NatureCoast project, scientists from six disciplinary research themes (see Chapter 1) met with the end-users to design the research approach at the proposal stage. From the outset, they hoped that the broad approach would produce useful interactions between knowledge development in different disciplines and utilization in the field (Figure 1). But, did the anticipated integration occur, and did it produce the desired interactions between the development of knowledge and practical applications?