Eos: 'Creating Communities to Help Interdisciplinary Scientists Thrive'
Global Land Programme's Laura Vang Rasmussen, Rachael Garrett, A. Sofia Nanni, Navin Ramankutty and Ariane de Bremond discuss the challenges interdisciplinary scientists face and how global communities can provide support and impact in this article on AGU’s Eos magazine.
Scientists who work across disciplines often dread the question, “What is your field of expertise?” A geographer working in an environmental science department or a social scientist working in an ecology department might find it difficult to articulate how their research, knowledge, and professional networks fit within established fields to colleagues long accustomed to their institutions’ disciplinary expectations and norms.
Most academic structures are still largely organized around relatively narrow disciplinary perspectives, even as the world’s biggest challenges require interdisciplinary solutions.
These moments of discomfort may seem trivial, but they signal a systemic barrier for many scientists and for scientific innovation and problem-solving: Most academic structures are still largely organized around relatively narrow disciplinary perspectives, even as the world’s biggest challenges require interdisciplinary solutions. Addressing natural hazards, biodiversity loss, poverty, and food insecurity simultaneously, for example, depends on scientists collaborating across fields and engaging with partners in other sectors of society.
This issue is not just one of semantics, especially for younger scientists and others who regularly experience its effects. Departments incentivized to select against interdisciplinary science and the absence of clear institutional “homes” for interdisciplinary scientists can create challenges for hiring, evaluation, and promotion. It can also reduce researchers’ sense of professional belonging and increase their feelings of being an imposter, which can affect their ability to contribute and even lead to the loss of scientific talent to other career paths.
Experiences in the field of land system science reflect broader tensions with interdisciplinarity across academic science. Researchers studying land system science, as we do, often find that their work resists neat disciplinary labels. Because this field encompasses the many ways that people and nature interact across Earth’s land surface and how these interactions shape global challenges like biodiversity loss, it can be difficult to describe the field in terms of preexisting academic departments and to identify appropriate funding sources and publication venues.
Here we share experiences navigating tensions that have come with pursuing interdisciplinary science, and we describe how one global interdisciplinary science community, the Global Land Programme (GLP), became a home for our work. Communities such as the GLP not only bring people together but also help create new pathways for turning research into solutions.
Image: Attendees socialize during an event at the 5th Open Science Meeting for the Global Land Programme (GLP) in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2024. Credit: Ximena Fargas
Published on Fri, 02/13/2026 - 14:08