Integrating the results of an interdisciplinary project over social and natural sciences: the Cliwac Explorer

Inter- and transdisciplinary projects often face the challenge of becoming scattered, due to the challenges of communication, collaboration and data integration. While co-design and close collaboration between all involved actors have been widely recommended to address congruence and representativity of all disciplines on the results and reports, inter- and transdisciplinary research often lacks platforms where these practices can be effectively carried out. The Einstein Research Unit “Climate and Water under Change” (CliWaC) investigated water-related issues in the Berlin-Brandenburg region, Germany, from diverse perspectives of more than 20 individual research groups across a wide range of disciplines - thus making it a perfect case for researching integration tools. By the end of the three-year project, we have developed a knowledge-based interactive data platform called the CliWaC Explorer, that can address the abovementioned issues and present research results and products in a coherent whole.

The CliWaC Explorer is designed as a multi-purpose tool: as a data-exploration platform for researchers studying water-related issues in the region, as a decision support tool for stakeholders and as an education and outreach tool for the wider public. One of the biggest challenges was to appeal to both a natural and a social science user base. We achieved this by allowing the users to both navigate topics spatially, as commonly done in map-based natural sciences or in a thematic plane, where project parts are organized according to their thematic relationships. The explorer has been developed with close collaboration of the project partners, and currently being further developed with a series of workshops, to be accessible by a wider user base including stakeholders and educators. We believe our platform could provide a template of how interdisciplinary research can be integrated, and how its results can be communicated to a wider audience.