Forum, Versailles, France
As human population centers increase pressure on surrounding ecosystems, studying ecological, biophysical, and socio-economic systems in isolation from one another becomes increasingly impossible. The boundaries between these systems continue to crumble, and scientists acknowledge that almost all human activities have potential relevance to global environments.
The United States' Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) and France's Zones Ateliers (ZAs) are both manifestations of a growing need for integrated environmental research and management (IERM), and proof of recognition that an IERM effort requires a conceptual approach, integrating the ecological, biophysical, and socio-economic components of the study systems. The integration of data, information, and knowledge is a central theme of IERM.
The LTER and ZA initiatives both offer unique approaches to traditional scientific research because they do not focus on the study of a priori defined research themes (e.g., productivity, biological diversity) but on specific questions pertaining to understanding the functioning of specific ecosystems. Another distinguishing feature of these two initiatives is their shared goal of developing networks of research projects that, although studying varied aspects of widely different ecosystems, interact and collaborate on shared areas of interest, rather than portfolios of independent projects working on similar topics.
The International LTER Workshop at the LTER ASM 2000 resulted in a workshop sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the French Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS), organized in Versailles, France (January 15-19, 2001). Participants explored the merits and added value of French-US collaboration in IERM. This workshop aimed at providing guidance on the substantive focus, institutional arrangements, and strategy for designing and implementing the proposed areas and mechanisms of collaboration between the two national research networks.
The 44 scientists attending the workshop (12 US, 30 French, and representatives from two other European countries) addressed three questions pertaining to the challenges, contributions, added value, and mechanisms to foster international network-to-network collaboration in IERM:
- What are the challenges and potential contributions of the French-US collaboration to the integration of information and knowledge across disciplines, spatio-temporal scales, ecosystem types, and geographic locations?
- What principles of integration of information are best suited to an international network-to-network collaboration in IERM?
- What are some of the research and management themes common to the French and US environmental research networks?
Five areas were recognized as requiring attention in an international network-to-network collaborative effort in IERM: integrated modeling, instrumentation, retrospective/prospective analysis, integrated ecological assessments, and synchrony/asynchrony of processes. These five areas are shared by most study sites involved in an IERM network, regardless of the specific research topic and ecosystem of interest. The workshop participants, organized into five breakout groups each addressing an area of interest, stressed the importance of reflecting national and/or regional differences in approaches and diversity of viewpoints, cultures, and socio-economic conditions in IERM. At the same time, it was recognized that international cooperation was needed to cover the full range of conditions in a gradient of ecological, biophysical, and socio-economic patterns and processes. The different sites, topics, and locations selected within and among each national network complement each other along this gradient, providing a major advantage of international network-to-network collaboration in IERM that was highlighted by all breakout groups.
Discussions involved international network-to-network collaboration at two of the three levels of activities conducted within a national IERM network. The participants emphasized that an interactive, mostly bottom-up approach should be retained. Areas of collaboration were prioritized at each of the two identified levels of network-to-network interactions (e.g., site-to-site joint studies, workshops, and integrated information management). Likewise, challenges, contributions, principles of integration, and shared research and management themes were identified using the following criteria to assess network-to-network collaboration in each of the five areas of interest: why collaboration is done, how it is done, the role of theory and decision-makers in framing the problem/question/approach, and the challenges and benefits of the activity.
Five initial projects, including data analysis, prototyping of tools common to the two national networks, and data/question driven workshops, were identified. They were selected because they could be completed within twelve months of the end of the workshop with little additional resources and minimal impact on the researchers involved. However, they are designed to be the first steps in a series leading to long-term, sustained collaboration at the two levels of international network-to-network collaboration.