Interdisciplinary Research at the Nation's Coastal Laboratories

The nation's coastal (i.e., marine and Great Lakes) laboratories and programs of aquatic research face serious challenges for survival in the decades to come. Although research in these institutions is strongly interdisciplinary, this characteristic and its effect are not widely recognized. Examples of successful interdisciplinary research are many, encompassing a wide range of scales of operation, from the varied technical approaches taken in individual laboratories to multi-laboratory, multi-institutional and multi-platform programs of very large scale. Our survey of interdisciplinary research in the nation's marine and coastal laboratories leads to three conclusions: (1) The trend toward collaboration in marine research is scientist-driven, rapid, and inexorable. It is driven by problems of increasing complexity, and the recognition that multiple approaches are synergistic and powerful, producing answers where single approaches cannot. (2) This trend is rapidly increasing the diversity of expertise and technical competence among coastal laboratories. (3) And the research community and its support agencies must therefore find new ways of representing this rapidly increasing diversity within the country's marine laboratories and their programs. Given past successes, we may be tempted to push forward with large multidisciplinary programs, but we should not neglect the funding required by innovative individual scientists. The marine and aquatic research community and its funding agencies face a major challenge in the years ahead: they must develop a publicly recognizable, national agenda for marine and coastal research that adequately represents the broad spectrum of interdisciplinary research entailed, while ensuring that nonconventional work and innovative "individual" science be effectively funded. Such a balanced approach is most likely to effect a sustained economic development of the nation's coastal zone.