CIMMAR The Center for Interdisciplinary Marine and Maritime Research

University of Zadar
in collaboration with University of Zagreb/FER/LABUST

1. Why and how to establish CIMMAR at UNIZD?

2. What initiated the CIMMAR idea? 3. Why interdisciplinarity and how to encourage it, e.g. at UNIZD?
4. Examples for future CIMMAR projects.

Reasons for CIMMAR at the University of Zadar

Need to address important transdisciplinary issues within the Zadar region CIMMAR increases UNIZD eligibility for future large EU research grants CIMMAR more visible to the EU than the existing isolated researchers within departments CIMMAR provides an organizational structure that allows the recruitment of funds directly from contracts with industry A research unit with the interdisciplinary depth of CIMMAR does not exist in Croatia or the Adriatic, and perhaps in the Mediterranean Numerous EU directives have emphasized the need for centers of interdisciplinary excellence UNIZD as a coastal university needs to expand its marine and maritime capacity Underwater and offshore research is expensive and logistically demanding, and CIMMAR would strengthen and increase the research capacity of each of the existing department by sharing existing research infrastructure and equipment capacity and by sharing knowledge and expertise.

CIMMAR in a nutshell
Because CIMMAR is conceived and founded first and foremost as an interdisciplinary body, it is proposed to exist and function independently of any individual academic department within the University of Zadar. The primary motivation for the formation of CIMMAR is to create a formal structure that makes UNIZD eligible to receive and administer large grants from the EC in marine and maritime research.

Members of CIMMAR already employed at UNIZD will remain employees within their respective academic departments, and membership in CIMMAR has no effect on prior teaching responsibilities or the relative time spent by any UNIZD employee in teaching versus research. The time committment to CIMMAR by any UNIZD employee will be a maximum of 25%. All research publications will list departmental membership of all coauthors and CIMMAR will be listed in the Acknowledgement.
CIMMAR, however, constitutes a structure within which EC funds can be used by UNIZD to hire researchers and support staff working collaboratively within and across multiple disciplines.

CIMMAR longterm purpose and strategy is to embody the following six foundational principles:
1. The Adriatic Sea has a central and defining presence within Croatian and regional culture, society, and economy in the past, present, and future; 2. The Adriatic Sea provides ecosystem services that have incalculable value to and continuous presence within Croatian and regional culture, society, and economy;

3. The health of the Adriatic Sea and its sustainability should remain a top priority in all planning decisions for the future of the region;
4. Maintaining the health and functioning of the Sea requires an active program of scientific research, using modern scientific tools, knowledge, and infrastructure; 5. The requisite research must be interdisciplinary, and involve a synergistic interaction among all natural sciences, social sciences, humanistic sciences; 6. The requisite research must also be transparent and available to planners and stakeholders, so that it can be immediately put to positive use for the benefit of the Adriatic Sea.

Initiation: an FP7 call

Marine Biology/Ecology
major capacities: evolutionary genetics, ecology of the Adriatic Sea, fish behavior and experimental ecology, fisheries biology ongoing research is directed toward fundamental questions in ecology and the development of predictive theories for the distribution of species in space and time.

application of these ideas to the Mediterranean sea is just beginning and therefore constitutes the filling of gaps
Croatia ideally situated to lead the way because of the highest linear extent of coastline and the absence of extreme ecosystem degradation and loss of habitat. Croatia is in a unique position to provide a rapid synthesis of information on natural baselines for coastal ecosystems in the Mediterranean, invaluable for both basic ecological science and for management needs.

Maritime and Nautical Archaeology.

The underwater and maritime archaeological research within the Department of Archaeology has a long tradition. Ongoing and future focus is on a modern and stateoftheart perspective to maritime archaeology one that is less focused on the protective and conserving aspects but emphasizes scientific investigation involving the testing of hypotheses. What is basically missing in the Mediterranean but now slowly emerging at the University of Zadar are truly scientific projects.

Aquaculture
very recent addition (2010) Goal: generation of innovations which affect aquaculture production, its environmental and economic sustainability, its technical maintenance, and its capacity to adapt to natural, economic and societal changes. ongoing research focus is on integrated multitrophic aquaculture (IMTA), something that is recognized worldwide but basically absent in the Mediterranean, so CIMMAR could become an innovation engine for the region. already build a strong consortium with the Zadar region, aquaculture farming community, and county government etc. needed to establish the conditions that favor the implementation of IMTA and other innovations

Geology and Geography

Ongoing geological studies of speleothems in submerged caves in order to reconstruct relative sealevel changes. Since 2005 several very important papers in the field published. Natural conditions in the Croatian Adriatic are favorable. Geography involved in scientific projects on the marine and maritime environment focusing on island development, demography, and littoralization. A substantial amount of data has been collected and reported in 20+ publications since 2007. Ongoing research focuses on hydrological relationships in the contact area of land and sea. i.e. to predict the degree of salt intrusion into coastal aquifers and water sources due to increased drought and sealevel rise.

History and IS department

The History department is heavily involved in marine and maritime history leading an active and growing programm of the history of the Croatian Adriatic maritime environment. The former UNIZD library sciences department has recently been restructured into the Information Science Department as a result of UNIZD participation in two TEMPUS projects. The department will support dissemination and data management actions.

Main outside partner: UNIZG/FER/LABUST

University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies (LABUST). primary partner from whom a transposition of skills and academic knowledge in the use, proliferation, management and commissioning of applicationsoriented marine robotics and ICT will be sought Incorporated into all CIMMAR projects: remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), interferometric, multibeam and sidescan sonars, various digital cameras, dataloggers and other digital sensors will all contribute to the creation, analysis, maintenance, mining and archiving scientific datasets.

Interdisciplinarity is required for three basic reasons:

1. Epistemological. Because all environmental challenges are multidimensional, with impacts spreading across all components of the environment and all functions of human society, their understanding, mitigation, and adaptive responses require vigorous and full engagement by all academic disciplines, making equal and interactive use of all ways of describing, interpreting, predicting, and evaluating environmental values, meaning, experience, and change (Vallega 1999) .

2. Operational. Any environmental challenge is a challenge because its solution is operationally difficult, perhaps borders on the impossible; therefore, collaboration and sharing of knowledge, labor, tools, equipment, and infrastructure will be necessary to overcome substantial operational obstacles. This is especially true for underwater research, which has always been more labor and cost intensive than terrestrial research, and prohibitively so for most small institutions in developing countries, with the result that progress in underwater research has historically been interdisciplinary and has proceeded in parallel with research and innovation in all kinds of underwater, submersible, robotic, visualization and mapping engineering and technology (Ballard et al. 2000).

3. Embeddedness. Environmental problems are thoroughly embedded in national and international political networks (Eden 1998) , which necessitates close collaboration between academics and lay persons in the support, funding, implementation, dissemination, and debate over the policy implications of scientific research and results. This requires an understanding and engagement of nonscientific ways of knowing about the environment, including local expertises and local knowledge that the public uses to evaluate the current and past state of the environment.

How to incourage IDT?

Special effort has to be made to learn the subject matter, methods, tools, languages, and cultures of disciplines and participants in different traditions which is hard and time consuming work. There is a need to establish regular physical meetings, a suitable cyberspace, and plenty social spaces for mingling and communication in informal ways ---avoid spatial isolation! Major discouragement with IDR is rooted in the Croatian education system. The eligibility of individuals to lead lecture courses and the evaluation of individuals research excellence strongly emphasizes monodisciplinarity and discourages the change of research direction by individuals over time as well as synchronic multidisciplinary involvements of individuals.

In the long run the university may develop novel career options specifically designed to recruit multidisciplinary researchers and establish support personnel with strong multidisciplinary educational backgrounds to back up and/or specifically cater to IDR.
In fact, if multidisciplinary education is allowed to become integrated into undergraduate and graduate programs, such personnel may be recruited directly from within the university, i. e. from UNIZDs interdisciplinary undergraduate study in Underwater science and technology (TEMPUS JEP_41082_2006).

From tool borrowing and multidisciplinarity to truly interdisciplinary research and new disciplines
tool borrowing: no effort at all is invested to conceive and formulate a shared question or to identify and solve shared problem as the motivation behind the collaborative research. Example LABUST/Marine biology UNIZD
Multidisciplinary collaboration is more complex and facilitates research in which each discipline makes a separate contribution each constituting distinct aspects of a shared problem and conceptualizing the problem/question/hypothesis was shared. Example TRITON/Marine biology UNIZD Truly Interdisciplinary research. The basic expectation from IDR should be that it can tackle tasks that can not be dealt with by individual units of CIMMAR or even by subsets consisting of combinations of units Examples: CaseStudy Campaigns

Interdisciplinary Mapping of Sea Transgression on Karst Shorelines in Croatia

Basic questions: At what time in the past did the sea inundate a particular location (longitude and latitude)? What consequences does level rise have sea on local aquifers?
Disciplines: Geology, geography, marine invertebrate zoology and ecology, biomathematical modelling, archaeology, history This is a joint geological, oceanographic, climatological, archaeological and biological study of paleo sealevel changes using speleothems and archaeological sites as proxies for paleo sea level.

Interdisciplinary Mapping of Sea Transgression on Karst Shorelines in Croatia

Here interdisciplinarity functions in several ways: 1. external forcing, namely sea level rise, has profound effects across disciplines. 2. to pinpoint the definitive time at which the sea progressed to a particular geographical location from speleothem data, physical models are not sufficient; rather biological models built from an understanding of fundamental biological processes and their expression within a particular cave environment are necessary. 3. crosscorroboration of these results is necessary for the replication required for the scientific process, and this corroboration necessarily must involve all sources of knowledge of sea level dynamics, including knowledge derived from archaeological studies, which are themselves inherently multidisciplinary. And finally, the overall function of this research within society is the profound importance of climate change on all aspects of the socioecosystem in the 21st century, with immediately measureable impacts on groundwater aquifer salinity.

Integrated Coastal Zone Management, Sustainability, and Aquaculture Can aquaculture be carried out in a sustainable manner in the Croatian Adriatic? Is integrated, multispecies, multitrophic aquaculture superior to monoculture aquaculture (ecologically or economically) in the Croatian Adriatic?
Basic questions: Disciplines: Fisheries science, biotechnology, economics, tourism, marine biology and ecology, Archaeology LTIR research on the sustainability of IMTA in the Croatian Adriatic, within a broader umbrella of developing scientifically informed guidelines for ICZM in Croatia. Because sustainability is an interdisciplinary construct, this research is necessarily interdisciplinary, and has two main components, respectively biotechnological and socioeconomic.

biotechnological research package

has two interacting components. 1. preliminary biological research is necessary to determine the suitability of candidate species for IMTA, in terms of nutritional requirements, growth rates and productivity, life cycle rates and requirements, needs of the juvenile stage, etc., all of which must take into account the future tropicalization of the Adriatic and its oligotrophic nature. 2. welldesigned manipulative field experiments using careful treatments and controls must be carried out to estimate with statistical confidence limits several biological parameters, including: a) the yield of the target species under a range of stocking densities; b) the differences in water and sediment quality neighboring IMTA and monospecies aquaculture; c) the extraction and assimilation rates of the partner extractive species, and the proportion thereof that is derived from aquaculture refuse; and d) longterm monitoring of biological, chemical, and physical conditions within the natural environment at control and impact sites, for the precise scientific quantification of impact.

socioeconomic research package

has two interacting components. 1. Preliminary market/geographic research is necessary to quantify the available infrastructural support and market for a range of potential target species and potential extractive partner species. This research must establish the basis for economic viability and technical feasibility of IMTA projects in different geographic locations, it should examine the regulatory conditions (formal and soft) suited to the promotion of IMTA as one of the options for sustainable aquaculture, and it should determine the potential for information dissemination and in particular public education and understanding of IMTA, its benefits both ecological and economic, to the local culture and economic system. 2. The sustainability of aquaculture can be increased through valueadded means beyond aquaculture itself. The major possibility that can be tested through pilot studies are a) increasing the local capacity for recreational touristic enjoyment of wild species and for local exploitation of wild species through habitat improvement. A documented consequence of aquaculture activities is the attraction of wild fish to the eutrophic conditions of the fish cages. This natural response can be greatly enhanced with the addition of threedimensional structural complexity to the sea bottom to serve as a habitat in support of wild populations attracted to the cages, and to independently attract wild populations.