Aim and approach
Biodiversity, climate, agriculture and food are each large, growing and multidisciplinary research areas in which a large number of researchers are active. The integration of knowledge within these areas is often characterised by traditional approaches. This is achieved, for example, by analysing the respective (sub-)literatures through review articles, anthologies, compendia and the like. In addition, research in these areas is characterised by the increasing availability of data, which has a significant impact on the development of new findings.
In more quantitatively oriented disciplines, systematic processing of data sets and meta-analyses have become established as a means of summarising large or ‘mature’ bodies of knowledge. In these increasingly confusing fields of science, this often leads to specialisation in smaller sub-areas, as this is the only way researchers can maintain an overview of the state of knowledge in terms of content and methodology. This could cause deficits in analysing issues at the interfaces of the area of action and conflict and, analogously, in the cooperation of different disciplines or methods.
The aim of this research & innovation area is to systematically process and integrate existing findings from various data and knowledge sources (‘state of the art’) at key interfaces between the thematic areas of biodiversity, climate, agriculture and nutrition, thereby identifying remaining knowledge gaps and documenting and communicating these findings and knowledge gaps. This objective motivates us to develop a framework concept and to map the framework concept in infrastructure for knowledge integration, which will be tested in case studies. In this way, new approaches and methods of knowledge integration will be developed and validated.
