How can I integrate heterogeneous data from different disciplines?

Overview

The data needed to assess a Nature Based Solution arrives in incompatible forms: gridded climate and land cover, gauge and satellite time series, parcel-level agricultural records, administrative statistics, insurance portfolios, and the qualitative material produced by working with stakeholders. Integrative modelling is the assembly problem — how those are brought into a single framework in which a change in one produces a defensible change in the others.

What the framework provides

The framework defines the components of the system and the connections between them, and it fixes the units and the resolution at each interface. Components that operate at different scales are connected explicitly, so that a hillslope process and a regional statistic are related by a stated rule rather than by a spatial join that silently assumes they are commensurate.

It also provides for the representation of knowledge that is not numerical. Expert judgement and stakeholder understanding enter the framework as stated relationships with a documented origin, which allows them to be tested and revised rather than either excluded or smuggled in as data. This is what makes it possible to integrate disciplines whose evidence is of different kinds without reducing all of it to the weakest common form.

The framework was built and then tested at the demonstration areas, which is where its limits became visible: the components that had to be simplified for a site, the data that did not exist and had to be substituted, and the places where two disciplines could not be reconciled at the resolution the decision required. Those limits are documented with the framework, because a reader applying it elsewhere will meet them.

What it enables

With the components connected, a scenario becomes a single operation rather than a sequence of separate studies. A land use change, a climate projection or an intervention can be introduced once and traced through hydrology, ecosystem service delivery, damage and value, which is what allows the comparison of options on a consistent basis and the identification of effects that a discipline-by-discipline assessment would leave out.