Findings and Recommendations - Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science - page 106

committee would provide superb settings, as well as an expanded infrastructure
for staging field-oriented educational programs for students and teachers.
Recommendation. EAR should take advantage of the broad appeal of field
work, its modest cost, and its ability to capture the enthusiasm and research
effort across a wide range of institutions by providing sufficient funding for
graduate and undergraduate field work.
Education is intrinsic to all basic research, but there is no one-size-fits-all
formula for enhancing the educational component. Uniform educational results
should not be expected. By utilizing a variety of approaches, EAR will gain the
flexibility it needs to create new educational opportunities within the context of
the basic research mission and to take advantage of the rapid changes caused by
the information revolution.
PARTNERSHIPS IN EARTH SCIENCE
The committee has highlighted ways in which EAR might participate in a
number of existing interagency programs and initiate new programmatic
partnerships to strengthen Earth science and realize the opportunities discussed in
this report. Partnerships among federal agencies have become increasingly
important mechanisms for organizing and sustaining large scientific efforts on
problems of national interest. 31 Such partnerships have a fourfold rationale: (1) to
foster the development of multidisciplinary communities needed to address the
high-level problems of complex systems; (2) to translate the results of basic
research into practical applications; (3) to leverage the limited resources available
to individual programs, including equipment and facilities; and (4) to coordinate
research across agency programs, thereby promoting synergies and reducing the
duplication of effort. These objectives are especially compelling in Earth science,
where high-priority national needs require the coordination of basic and applied
research over a range of difficult system-level problems. Realizing the benefits of
interagency collaborations can be problematic,
31 A prominent example in geoscience is the U.S. Global Change Research Program,
which coordinates research on global environmental changes across all federal agencies,
interfaces U.S. efforts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other
international assessments, and reports annually to the President and Congress on research
results and their implications for federal policies; see http://www.usgcrp.gov .