Aquaculture production must continue to grow to contribute to the growing need for additional food to meet an increasing demand of the world's growing human population for animal protein. Continued growth will require that production systems meet human needs in a way that is economically sustainable and does not compromise the continued availability of energy resources, ecosystem services, resiliency of natural resources, or the ability to protect animals and humans from virulent pathogens. The technological advances that have led to increased globalization have facilitated increased international travel and trade that have increased interactions and effects on food safety, aquatic animal disease, and marketing issues on a global scale.

Scientific breakthroughs and technological advances will need to be applied to aquaculture to ensure continued growth within the context of the impacts of ever-increasing population levels. The complexity and interrelated nature of such issues have led to increasing calls for scientists to adopt a more interdisciplinary team-based work paradigm. Scientists traditionally have tended to specialize in a specific discipline, such as genetics, nutrition, water quality, aquatic animal health, engineering, or economics. Within these disciplines, the tendency is to specialize even further, into very narrow subdisciplines. The result is limited or no engagement with individuals who specialize in other disciplines that would enhance the scientific research effort and produce a more meaningful and likely successful solution.

While engineers have long recognized the need to solve design problems through teams that include a variety of expertise, the natural sciences have tended to continue to operate in the more traditional fashion of immersion within a single discipline. However, there is a growing trend to encourage an increase in team-based approaches in the biological sciences to address complex issues of the day. For example, the National Cancer Institute has developed a “team science toolkit” program to promote the development of teams of scientists that cross traditional disciplinary lines (National Cancer Institute 2016). Such teams integrate their diverse perspectives to tackle complex problems with the goal of increasing the rate of scientific innovation, dissemination, and adoption by stakeholders. Natural resource administrators of land-grant universities have also recognized that effective problem solving related to natural resources issues will require cooperation across specific disciplines (APLU 2014). Young scientists will need to be trained to work effectively on interdisciplinary teams and new educational methodologies will be needed to do so (Begg et al. 2014).

A recent publication of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science, Critical Role of Animal Science Research in Food Security and Sustainability (NRC 2015), contains an overarching recommendation calling for “a holistic approach to animal productivity and sustainability.” Within that recommendation is an advocacy that both public and private funding agencies incorporate inter- and transdisciplinary approaches for research on animal productivity and sustainability.

In aquaculture, the National Strategic Research Plan developed in the USA also calls for interdisciplinary research “to improve competitiveness, production efficiency, economic viability, and long-term environmental sustainability…” (NSTC 2014). The plan focused on issues of sustainability, water resources, climate change, a profitable and sustainable agricultural sector, and energy resources that will require a more collaborative and cooperative approach throughout the supply chain from aquaculture service industries to farms to markets. Stimulating the innovation that will be required for complex systems in a complex environment will require greater cooperation and a more team-oriented approach to research than has been the norm in aquaculture research.

Additionally, success of sustainable aquaculture production will require the contributions of allied socioeconomic research to guide decision makers and scientists about what ultimately constitutes useful and applicable research. An example of transdisciplinary research in aquaculture would be the efforts of social scientists to help establish global guidelines, standards, and regulations of international scale related to aquaculture trade and the corresponding protection of the consumer of those products.

Aquaculture research has begun to blend across disciplinary lines. For example, we now know that studies on nutrition of aquatic animals frequently require understanding of the effects on gut microflora or on immune systems that may require analyses and interpretation by fish health scientists (recent examples in JWAS include: Arab and Islami 2015; Barros et al. 2015; Kokou et al. 2015; Sangma and Kamilya 2015; Xu et al. 2015) or effects of diet on gene expression (such as in Li et al. 2015). The development of novel techniques to prevent and treat diseases often requires the skill of molecular biologists and geneticists (as in Alvarez-Ruiz et al. 2015), while molecular techniques can identify epidemiological patterns of parasites as related to aquaculture production (Tamaru et al. 2016). Analyses of new production systems and management strategies will be of little value to aquaculture producers without an analysis of the economic effects and trade-offs (a recent example in this journal is Hernández et al. 2016).

The Journal of the World Aquaculture Society's (JWAS) aim is to provide the science that encompasses the inter- and transdisciplinary engagement strategies that lead to technological innovations whereby major issues facing global aquaculture can be solved. While (JWAS) will continue to welcome discipline-specific manuscripts, inter- and transdisciplinary studies that result in new conceptual and methodological innovations in response to the critical issues facing aquaculture are needed and encouraged. Thus, manuscripts that report science related to sustainability of aquaculture practices in its broadest sense (environmental, social, and economic), food safety, epidemiological aspects of important pathogens, biosafety practices, biodiversity, climate change, animal welfare, socioeconomics, feed technology, integration of extension, global food security, and other applicable topics are encouraged as long as there is clear evidence of a contribution to growth and development of aquaculture.

Republished from Journal of World Aquaculture Society by permission of the author and publisher