Overcoming Specialization

Abstract

Many of the most challenging problems in bioscience require advances in a multitude of technical and nontechnical disciplines for progress to be made. Biodiversity, biocomplexity, biotechnology, species and ecosystem conservation, and bioterrorism require expertise from myriad technical, legal, political, financial, and cultural disciplines. For example, environmental biocomplexity is founded on the idea that research on the individual components of environmental systems provides only limited information about the behavior of the systems themselves. Careful attention to the interplay among components is critical to obtaining the level of predictive information on which management and regulatory decisions must be made. To understand the complex interdependencies among living organisms and the environments that affect, sustain, and are modified by them, efforts that transcend multiple disciplines are required. Such efforts span temporal and spatial scales, consider multiple levels of biological organization, cross conceptual boundaries, use contemporary technologies, and link research to environmental decisionmaking. Advancing the understanding of the nature and role of biological complexity demands increased attention from and new collaborations of scientists from a broad spectrum of fields—biology, physics, chemistry, geology, hydrology, statistics, engineering, computation, and social sciences. In addition, advances in large-scale applications of remote sensors to monitor environmental biosystems require access to the latest science and engineering literature in remote sensing, nondestructive evaluation, signal and image processing, pattern recognition, multisource data fusion, fluid dynamics, acoustics, robotics, materials, electronics, and many other disciplines.

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