An Interdisciplinary Approach for a Water Sustainability Study

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary research is often challenging as a result of the different backgrounds of researchers from different disciplines. Such difficulty frequently hinders the understanding, communication, and collaboration among researchers from different disciplines. Meanwhile, research methods in geography can effectively link and synthesize different discipline-specific information. In this study, we show the application of geographic information systems (GIS) for the spatial analysis in a water sustainability project. We also show that GIS, as a spatial decision support system, could be effectively used for managing both hydrologic and social factors. With GIS, the project was able to integrate multidisciplinary data sets and visualize spatial information via a Web platform for sharing and communication. Our study demonstrated that geographic research methods could be effective when facilitating collaborations among the humanities, social science, and engineering to quantify social objectives and constraints, and providing insight in solving grand challenge problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-discipline
• water sustainability
• geospatial data integration
• collaboration