Challenges and opportunities in transdisciplinary science: The experience of next generation scientists in an agriculture and climate research collaboration

TRANSDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE Agriculture in the twenty-first century faces unprecedented challenges from increasing climate variability to growing demands on natural resources to globalizing economic markets. These emerging agricultural issues, spanning both human and natural dimensions, are uniquely formulated, exceedingly complex, and difficult to address within existing disciplinary domains (Eigenbrode et al. 2007; Reganold et al. 2011; Foley et al. 2005; Hansen et al. 2013). Therefore, the next generation of scientists working on these issues must not only be highly trained within a disciplinary context but must also have the capacity to collaborate with others to solve systems-level problems. To this end, transdisciplinary research continues to grow in the agricultural context. Scientists are encouraged to bridge the social and biophysical sciences in addressing concurrent goals of maintaining high yielding commodities, productive ecosystem services, and human well-being. This new scientific paradigm is what Collins et al. define as a “knowledge base that can be used to help solve current and future environmental challenges” (2011). Fry (2001) defines transdisciplinary studies as those that reach “a high degree of integration where theories, models and methods merge” across fields. Our conceptualization of transdisciplinarity is the integration of methods, information, and perspectives from several disciplines (Francis et…