In cooperation with the Young Hydrologic Society (www.younghs.com)

It is widely acknowledged that cross-pollination between the hydrological sciences and neighboring disciplines is required to advance our understanding of the earth systems we study and tackle societally relevant problems. This is appreciated with the formation of new sub disciplines like socio-hydrology, eco-hydrology, hydro-informatics, etcetera. Yet, already hydrologists with different backgrounds seem to speak different languages, and, for good reasons or not, also approach problems differently. This means that synthesis is often challenging, and that young hydrologists have to think strategically about how they can contribute to these overarching goals, while pursuing their own research and career goals. This poses questions like:
- How much do you want to depend on other people?
- How much do you want/need to understand how the other specialists work and think?
- How can you be critical of other, possibly more senior, scientists, without being the expert yourself?
- In how far should you invest extra time in collaborating if this is not useful to your project or goals that you are pursuing? - How useful is it to apply you skillset in a different domain, apart from it being novel?

You may have to address these questions while being the most dependent and vulnerable person in a large collaborative project, and in this session we try to provide some help. We bring together senior hydrologists with various backgrounds to share their experience on multidisciplinary collaborations. We thereby try to identify what guidelines are practiced and where you or the community have to pay more attention to.
The event will open with each of the invited experts giving a short presentation, followed by an open discussion between the audience and the panel of experts. Finally, there will be an opportunity to continue informal discussions with the experts after the session.