About this Research Topic
Conservation challenges like human wildlife conflict and coexistence, require us to cross our disciplinary boundaries. As a result, multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary research is gaining traction in conservation science, in particular by combining approaches from the biological and social sciences. While this shift is necessary for our understanding of these issues, crossing disciplinary boundaries also comes with challenges. For example, research methods and knowledge from other disciplines can be misunderstood, wrongly applied or misrepresented. As a consequence, scarce resources are sometimes wasted on collecting uninformative data, leading to ineffective or inappropriate conservation efforts that can result in harm to both humans and nature.
The social sciences are increasingly used to understand the growing complexity of challenges that face conservation and can produce in-depth understanding of challenges at comparatively low cost. While progress has been made in convincing biologists of the value of the social sciences for tackling/understanding these issues, there is still the sense that some biologically trained researchers assume that social research can be easily conducted. From a social science perspective, it sometimes seems as if ecologists assume they can easily conduct a survey without actual training on the topic or understanding the (political) complexities involved in collecting reliable data. From an ecologist perspective, sometimes social scientists could increase the reliability of social data by exploring the incorporation of measures to account for biases and uncertainty developed in other fields.
With this Research Topic, we hope to contribute to overcoming differing epistemologies, worldviews, priorities and ways of approaching research between ecology and the social sciences instead of validating one with the other. We therefore open the call for contributions that work towards addressing these challenges and opportunities for mutual learning among different disciplines in conservation science. We invite researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to submit innovative papers that examine the role of interdisciplinary approaches in conservation science and apply this in novel ways, highlight the benefits of interdisciplinary collaborations, and identify best practices for integrating different disciplines in conservation research. We particularly encourage submissions of case studies that successfully demonstrate the application of integrated and innovative methodology, especially when this involves creative and appropriate ways of applying methods and knowledge from other fields.
The social sciences are increasingly used to understand the growing complexity of challenges that face conservation and can produce in-depth understanding of challenges at comparatively low cost. While progress has been made in convincing biologists of the value of the social sciences for tackling/understanding these issues, there is still the sense that some biologically trained researchers assume that social research can be easily conducted. From a social science perspective, it sometimes seems as if ecologists assume they can easily conduct a survey without actual training on the topic or understanding the (political) complexities involved in collecting reliable data. From an ecologist perspective, sometimes social scientists could increase the reliability of social data by exploring the incorporation of measures to account for biases and uncertainty developed in other fields.
With this Research Topic, we hope to contribute to overcoming differing epistemologies, worldviews, priorities and ways of approaching research between ecology and the social sciences instead of validating one with the other. We therefore open the call for contributions that work towards addressing these challenges and opportunities for mutual learning among different disciplines in conservation science. We invite researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to submit innovative papers that examine the role of interdisciplinary approaches in conservation science and apply this in novel ways, highlight the benefits of interdisciplinary collaborations, and identify best practices for integrating different disciplines in conservation research. We particularly encourage submissions of case studies that successfully demonstrate the application of integrated and innovative methodology, especially when this involves creative and appropriate ways of applying methods and knowledge from other fields.
Keywords: interdisciplinary research, human-wildlife conflict, social sciences, conservation science, ecology
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
