Editor’s Message: How much interdisciplinary collaboration between the natural and social sciences is there in groundwater research?

Excerpt

A statement in the editorial of a recently published special issue on interdisciplinarity in Nature (2015, p. 305) caught our attention: “To solve the grand challenges facing society — energy, water, climate, food, health scientists and social scientists must work together”. We, that is the author, a hydrogeologist, and Roman Seidl, an environmental psychologist at the Department of Environmental Systems Science, Transdisciplinarity Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, had previously worked together in the context of a large multidisciplinary project which had a particular focus on the integration of natural and social science questions. Whether or not the integration in that specific project had worked well would be worth a discussion of its own; however, one outcome of this endeavour was a raised interest in research collaboration across the natural-social science divide. Both being interested in water resources, we had started out by investigating collaboration at the interface between the natural and social sciences, which involved conducting a survey among hydrologists, asking them questions with regard to their views on the status and nature of such a collaboration. The link to the online survey was sent to members of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH) and the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) and a selection of 1,800 authors of articles in journals such as Water Resources Research or Water International. Some of the questions were inspired by the recently introduced concept of socio-hydrology (Sivapalan et al. 2012), which is regarded by some as a framework for bringing together hydrology and social sciences. The survey’s results show that most hydrologists agree that collaboration with social scientists has to be intensified; however, there is no clear consensus on how this could be achieved, or how collaboration should be performed. Specifically, socio-hydrology as a young emerging, and rapidly evolving concept, seems to have the tendency to assimilate social science questions into hydrology, rather than achieving integration through explicit collaboration. The full results of this study are presented in Seidl and Barthel (2017). …