Project
WMG Task 5 Integrated application of WR models
Wageningen Research has many powerful modeling tools to address todays global challenges. Many of these challenges however, such as climate change and food security, are linked with each other and require an interdisciplinary, integrated approach to capture the full scope of the problem and address this. The aim of Task 5 is to facilitate collaboration between modeling groups to address these integrated global challenges.
Connecting models together from different disciplines can provide additional opportunities for Wageningen to address complex global challenges, however this process is costly and is currently often done in an ad hoc fashion without a long term strategic plan for maintaining these model linkages.
With this in mind, Task 5 aims to better facilitate collaboration across models from various disciplines by (1) creating an inventory to share knowledge of best practices with respect to model collaboration and (2) by providing recommendations for governance of the linked models as a single system to maintain the links between models so that the investment in model linking does not dissipate after a project ends but continues to support the analysis and research capabilities at Wageningen Research.
In 2022 we build on the previous two years to integrate relevant best practices into ongoing research projects that involve multiple models from various disciplines and to evaluate their usefulness together with the project leaders. We will also be engaging with the Wageningen Modelling Group governance initiative on how best to implement our institutional recommendations to insure long term maintenance of the models as a linked system. Finally we synthesize the feedback we receive into a set of guidelines to better facilitate collaboration across models at Wageningen Research.
This also involves interaction with the other tasks covered by the WMG, e.g., model quality (Task 3), the development of coding practices and meta-data guidelines (Task 4) or the WMG governance initiative. Further as model collaboration requires the elaboration of various elements of best modelling practices, task 5 will also contribute to, or build on, the wiki page developed by task 4. The interaction with other WMG tasks will be presented in the combined WMG Modelling workshop at the end of 2022.