Professional Documents
Culture Documents
University of Zadar
in collaboration with University of Zagreb/FER/LABUST
2. What initiated the CIMMAR idea? 3. Why interdisciplinarity and how to encourage it, e.g. at UNIZD?
4. Examples for future CIMMAR projects.
CIMMAR in a nutshell
Because CIMMAR is conceived and founded first and foremost as an interdisciplinary body, it is proposed to exist and function independently of any individual academic department within the University of Zadar. The primary motivation for the formation of CIMMAR is to create a formal structure that makes UNIZD eligible to receive and administer large grants from the EC in marine and maritime research.
Members of CIMMAR already employed at UNIZD will remain employees within their respective academic departments, and membership in CIMMAR has no effect on prior teaching responsibilities or the relative time spent by any UNIZD employee in teaching versus research. The time committment to CIMMAR by any UNIZD employee will be a maximum of 25%. All research publications will list departmental membership of all coauthors and CIMMAR will be listed in the Acknowledgement.
CIMMAR, however, constitutes a structure within which EC funds can be used by UNIZD to hire researchers and support staff working collaboratively within and across multiple disciplines.
CIMMAR longterm purpose and strategy is to embody the following six foundational principles:
1. The Adriatic Sea has a central and defining presence within Croatian and regional culture, society, and economy in the past, present, and future; 2. The Adriatic Sea provides ecosystem services that have incalculable value to and continuous presence within Croatian and regional culture, society, and economy;
3. The health of the Adriatic Sea and its sustainability should remain a top priority in all planning decisions for the future of the region;
4. Maintaining the health and functioning of the Sea requires an active program of scientific research, using modern scientific tools, knowledge, and infrastructure; 5. The requisite research must be interdisciplinary, and involve a synergistic interaction among all natural sciences, social sciences, humanistic sciences; 6. The requisite research must also be transparent and available to planners and stakeholders, so that it can be immediately put to positive use for the benefit of the Adriatic Sea.
Marine Biology/Ecology
major capacities: evolutionary genetics, ecology of the Adriatic Sea, fish behavior and experimental ecology, fisheries biology ongoing research is directed toward fundamental questions in ecology and the development of predictive theories for the distribution of species in space and time.
application of these ideas to the Mediterranean sea is just beginning and therefore constitutes the filling of gaps
Croatia ideally situated to lead the way because of the highest linear extent of coastline and the absence of extreme ecosystem degradation and loss of habitat. Croatia is in a unique position to provide a rapid synthesis of information on natural baselines for coastal ecosystems in the Mediterranean, invaluable for both basic ecological science and for management needs.
Aquaculture
very recent addition (2010) Goal: generation of innovations which affect aquaculture production, its environmental and economic sustainability, its technical maintenance, and its capacity to adapt to natural, economic and societal changes. ongoing research focus is on integrated multitrophic aquaculture (IMTA), something that is recognized worldwide but basically absent in the Mediterranean, so CIMMAR could become an innovation engine for the region. already build a strong consortium with the Zadar region, aquaculture farming community, and county government etc. needed to establish the conditions that favor the implementation of IMTA and other innovations
1. Epistemological. Because all environmental challenges are multidimensional, with impacts spreading across all components of the environment and all functions of human society, their understanding, mitigation, and adaptive responses require vigorous and full engagement by all academic disciplines, making equal and interactive use of all ways of describing, interpreting, predicting, and evaluating environmental values, meaning, experience, and change (Vallega 1999) .
2. Operational. Any environmental challenge is a challenge because its solution is operationally difficult, perhaps borders on the impossible; therefore, collaboration and sharing of knowledge, labor, tools, equipment, and infrastructure will be necessary to overcome substantial operational obstacles. This is especially true for underwater research, which has always been more labor and cost intensive than terrestrial research, and prohibitively so for most small institutions in developing countries, with the result that progress in underwater research has historically been interdisciplinary and has proceeded in parallel with research and innovation in all kinds of underwater, submersible, robotic, visualization and mapping engineering and technology (Ballard et al. 2000).
3. Embeddedness. Environmental problems are thoroughly embedded in national and international political networks (Eden 1998) , which necessitates close collaboration between academics and lay persons in the support, funding, implementation, dissemination, and debate over the policy implications of scientific research and results. This requires an understanding and engagement of nonscientific ways of knowing about the environment, including local expertises and local knowledge that the public uses to evaluate the current and past state of the environment.
In the long run the university may develop novel career options specifically designed to recruit multidisciplinary researchers and establish support personnel with strong multidisciplinary educational backgrounds to back up and/or specifically cater to IDR.
In fact, if multidisciplinary education is allowed to become integrated into undergraduate and graduate programs, such personnel may be recruited directly from within the university, i. e. from UNIZDs interdisciplinary undergraduate study in Underwater science and technology (TEMPUS JEP_41082_2006).
From tool borrowing and multidisciplinarity to truly interdisciplinary research and new disciplines
tool borrowing: no effort at all is invested to conceive and formulate a shared question or to identify and solve shared problem as the motivation behind the collaborative research. Example LABUST/Marine biology UNIZD
Multidisciplinary collaboration is more complex and facilitates research in which each discipline makes a separate contribution each constituting distinct aspects of a shared problem and conceptualizing the problem/question/hypothesis was shared. Example TRITON/Marine biology UNIZD Truly Interdisciplinary research. The basic expectation from IDR should be that it can tackle tasks that can not be dealt with by individual units of CIMMAR or even by subsets consisting of combinations of units Examples: CaseStudy Campaigns
Basic questions: At what time in the past did the sea inundate a particular location (longitude and latitude)? What consequences does level rise have sea on local aquifers?
Disciplines: Geology, geography, marine invertebrate zoology and ecology, biomathematical modelling, archaeology, history This is a joint geological, oceanographic, climatological, archaeological and biological study of paleo sealevel changes using speleothems and archaeological sites as proxies for paleo sea level.
Here interdisciplinarity functions in several ways: 1. external forcing, namely sea level rise, has profound effects across disciplines. 2. to pinpoint the definitive time at which the sea progressed to a particular geographical location from speleothem data, physical models are not sufficient; rather biological models built from an understanding of fundamental biological processes and their expression within a particular cave environment are necessary. 3. crosscorroboration of these results is necessary for the replication required for the scientific process, and this corroboration necessarily must involve all sources of knowledge of sea level dynamics, including knowledge derived from archaeological studies, which are themselves inherently multidisciplinary. And finally, the overall function of this research within society is the profound importance of climate change on all aspects of the socioecosystem in the 21st century, with immediately measureable impacts on groundwater aquifer salinity.
Integrated Coastal Zone Management, Sustainability, and Aquaculture Can aquaculture be carried out in a sustainable manner in the Croatian Adriatic? Is integrated, multispecies, multitrophic aquaculture superior to monoculture aquaculture (ecologically or economically) in the Croatian Adriatic?
Basic questions: Disciplines: Fisheries science, biotechnology, economics, tourism, marine biology and ecology, Archaeology LTIR research on the sustainability of IMTA in the Croatian Adriatic, within a broader umbrella of developing scientifically informed guidelines for ICZM in Croatia. Because sustainability is an interdisciplinary construct, this research is necessarily interdisciplinary, and has two main components, respectively biotechnological and socioeconomic.