'Bridging scales in human-environment research' survey
Research on and for the transformation towards sustainability requires interdisciplinary collaboration. When dealing with questions related to complex topics such as climate change impacts, global inequality, food insecurity and biodiversity loss, a wide range of methodological and theoretical perspectives are needed. Researchers working at different scales contribute different theories and methods, and generate diverse findings and insights. In order to fully address the complexity of the current sustainability challenges, there is a need to link and integrate knowledge produced at very different scales. Questions of ‘scale’ and ‘scaling’, therefore, present substantial challenges for interdisciplinary research and require researchers to consider novel ways of ‘bridging scales’.
The Postdoc and Young Researchers' Network based at the Integrative Research Institute for Transformation of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin had launched a survey in collaboration with KOSMOS conference on 'Bridging scales in interdisciplinary human-environment research'. The aim of this survey was to better understand the main challenges related to 'bridging scales' that researchers working in interdisciplinary human-environment research are facing, and to find the most suitable solutions and strategies for tackling those challenges. The survey contained 14 questions and took approximately 10 minutes to complete. The results were compiled, analysed, and published to highlight research frontiers for bridging scales in interdisciplinary human-environment research: