Over a year after the State of the York Watershed System project ended, we spoke with project lead Cirse Gonzalez about what happened after the team finalized the report and shared it with their intended users. Our conversation covered a range of topics including what makes collaboration meaningful, the importance of including community members, local knowledge holders, and other unique voices in the collaborative process.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Why do you use collaborative science in your work?
There really is no other way to get at meaningful, sustainable, and resilient outputs. To me, a meaningful project serves “end users” – though I like to call them “beginning users” – and answers the question “why are you doing this,” with some kind of input from users or a rationale that centers around them. Collaborative science also reminds us that the work doesn’t start and end with us. We need to keep the users front and foremost, otherwise, what is this all for? It also makes the products more sustainable over time, so that they have more staying power.
I think our reserve is coming to terms with collaborative science and learning to use it in new ways. That may not have been at the forefront of the way that we executed our science previously but we have been learning new ways to incorporate collaboration. It's not that we haven't collaborated with a lot of different partners before, it's that we're engaging them in new ways and on new projects and including a variety of them. It's not always the same partners on the same projects. We do have our steadfast partners but I think that as we've grown to work on different projects, and get involved in new spaces, we have recognized the value of reaching out to new and different partners and collaborating in ways that we haven't before.
Why did you do the State of the York project and how did you know it was needed?
The need stemmed directly from our users that were part of this watershed roundtable who said, “hey, it's been about 20 years since we last saw a report for our local river and watershed, the York River and its associated watershed, and we need something.” They wanted an indication of status, trends, and opportunities related to their watershed. The focus of the report had been water quality, and that was the focus of this roundtable group, but it expanded so much further than that, recognizing that there are a lot of different topics interconnected with water quality. There hadn't been a report providing baseline information on water quality related topics in 20 years, as opposed to our neighboring rivers and watersheds, which have an annual report come out every year.
So, we made it happen, and it couldn't have been done without the NERRS Science Collaborative, and the patience that went alongside that – the recognition that it would take time to produce something that was meaningful. And that's exactly what ended up happening. With the input that we had from watershed stakeholders, a needs assessment that followed in the wake of that, and the funding that we received from the Science Collaborative, we were able to produce something that folks needed and wanted and are using to this day. This is super exciting for me as the lead on development.
How has collaborative science positioned your research and community partners to take action on some of those shared goals?
I can't help but think about the calls to action that we've been working towards as part of the State of the York Watershed System. A big call to action has been our campaign to DROP (Deepen your understanding of the issues; Recreate responsibly in, and on, our shared waters; Opt-in to conscious consumption; and Participate in community efforts). Without the collaborative nature of that project and the partners that got involved, I don't know that we would have landed on something like that and that has been so well-received, watershed-wide, and that has staying power that we're leveraging right now in our communications campaigns.
How do you feel about what's been happening since the State of the York project ended?
I feel so good about it. I am so happy with the product and the collaboration that went into it. And there's been so much meaningful progress since. People are still asking for presentations. We are still doing a monthly webinar to get people engaged on the topics in the report and familiarize them with the people behind them, bringing in those partners that were established during the process. Our name continues to be centralized and garners a great reputation on account of being attached to this report. So it is still making really big waves, and I'm super proud of that.
What about collaborative science made all of that possible?
When I've talked about collaboration, and also as part of my longer lectures on the State of the York Watershed System, I talk about transdisciplinary science and my love for bringing in community and multiple ways of knowing into this process that we call collaboration. I use a medical analogy to liken my role in the collaborative process to that of a patient advocate. In the example, a patient has had something going on in her system that has been related to her head, her heart, her kidneys, and has been seeing these specialists in their offices in different places. They collect her data. They think about it for a little bit. They send her outputs in MyChart or whatever – it’s multi-disciplinary science, in a way but it's all kind of happening in its own vacuum.
In an interdisciplinary world, a more ideal step would be to have those different doctors, which are all part of the same system, sit in the same room and go over her results as a whole and talk through what they're seeing, the prognosis, etc. and then maybe send outputs back to her.
In a transdisciplinary world, which is my most ideal, she would be in that room with them, going over the results and providing her input and telling her story and then working with them on a solution that would be sustainable for her.
In this analogy, I talk about myself as the patient advocate, bringing the community to the people who have been sitting in their silos, and trying to make this collaborative process work. We did that with the State of the York Watershed System project through needs assessments, through engagement and informational interviews, and through beta testing. Through all of that, we heard directly from the people who were beginning and end users to best inform what the experts were being asked to deliver.
“Just as your body is one holistic system, so is nature. So why are we treating it through very siloed approaches?”
It just doesn't work like that. Hence the beauty of collaboration, and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work.
Are there other impacts that you've seen as a result of this work now that some time has passed?
I think we've become a “go-to” place in the region, and for reasons that we hadn't been before. We weren't necessarily on people’s radar as an organization before, but now it's like, “oh, I know CBNERR” because we’ve collaborated and reached out to a whole new suite of partners through this process. Now there's some familiarity, there's some rapport, and there are relationships that have been built. We're getting new updates and invites and outreach where that wasn't necessarily the case before.
I will add that, for as many doors as this report opened in the process of its development, it has opened a whole lot more for future study and continued collaboration. I think digging into the stories, particularly those behind the cultural and historical resources listed in the State of the York Watershed System report, is something that has been repeatedly addressed and requested as we continue to communicate the findings of the report.
Is there anything about the collaborative process itself that led to that opening of doors you mentioned?
The first thing that comes to mind is listening. If there's one thing that opened more doors than we anticipated it was the listening aspect of the process, because if we had not listened or not been receptive to the input coming in, then I think that this report would've looked very different than what we initially set out to do. We had to be super flexible if we were to make good on the feedback and input we received, both through formal means like that needs assessment as well as informal ones like those side conversations at meetings.
One other lesson learned for me was that the collaborative process takes more time than anticipated. I felt like I kind of knew that and I anticipated it would take a certain amount of time and then it still took longer than that. Relationship building takes time. It was important to bring multiple experts and perspectives to the development of this report through a collaborative process because we wouldn't have been able to pull off something as holistic and as relevant as we did without those perspectives and that experience in the mix.