Ideas and Perspectives: Proposed Best Practices for Collaboration at Cross-Disciplinary Observatories

Interdisciplinary science affords new opportunities but also presents new challenges for biogeosciences collaboration. Since 2007, we have conducted site-based interdisciplinary research in central PA, USA, at the Susquehanna Shale Hills critical zone observatory. Early in our collaboration, we realized the need for some best practices that could guide our project team. While we found some guidelines for determining authorship on papers, we found fewer guidelines describing how to collaboratively establish field sites, share instrumentation, share model code, and share data. Thus, we worked as a team to develop a best practices document that is presented here. While this work is based on one large team project, we think many of the themes are universal, and we present our example to provide a building block for improving the function of interdisciplinary biogeoscience science teams.