Introduction: Towards holistic knowledge of marine environmental changes

Abstract

<p>Many marine environmental changes can be understood in terms of wicked problems because of their unique, uncertain, complex, multifaceted, and interdependent character. As in the entire volume, this introductory chapter addresses marine environmental changes as wicked problems from an interdisciplinary perspective. The aim is to encourage the recognition of, and dialogue among, different kinds of knowledge systems relevant to the research of marine environmental changes. These include not only knowledge produced by researchers representing various scientific disciplines but also knowledge produced together with stakeholders, or outside scholarly practice, such as local knowledge. This chapter discusses the quest for interdisciplinarity in ocean studies, humanities and social sciences as well as the terminology of multiple disciplines. It explicates the challenges of interdisciplinary research and describes marine interdisciplinarity in action, introducing the genealogy of the book project as well as the individual chapters.<br></p>