Salt intrusion is a growing problem in many deltas around the world. During periods with low river discharges, salinity upstream in a delta increases and affects freshwater availability, ecology, and other delta functions. For example, in the Rhine-Meuse estuary (the Netherlands), brackish water can reach drinking water intakes about 40 km from the estuary mouth during droughts. Salt intrusion is likely to become more severe in the context of climate change, as a result of sea level rise and a lower river discharge during droughts. The challenges with salt intrusion for the Netherlands are addressed in the Salti Solutions research program. Within this program the Delta Management Game offers an interactive environment where policy-making stakeholders can experience salt intrusion management and experiment with adaptation and mitigation strategies in the Rhine-Meuse estuary. As a serious game, the goal is for players to “learn by taking actions and by experiencing their effects through feedback mechanisms that are deliberately built into and around the game” (Mayer, 2009, p. 825). A particular design challenge for serious games is simplifying the environmental system and sufficiently representing the relevant physics, while offering exploratory and experimentation through (near-)instant, interactive feedback. The physical module for salt intrusion in the Delta Management Game should be able to deal with, among others, changes in bathymetry (e.g. depth or width of waterways, adding a sill) of the estuary in the game, while offering relatively quick feedback. @en

Transdisciplinary research requires improved knowledge exchange between science and practice. Such improvements include diversifying and scaling up knowledge accessing and sharing through online platforms. We conducted twenty interviews informed by behavioral science methods to clarify the aim, components, and participants' perspectives on the usefulness of the proposed components for an envisioned platform. Participants were members of a Dutch community of practice for river studies and a research programme into integrated and collaborative management. The proposed concept included storylines, data repositories, user profiles, interactive visualisations, and collaborative sessions. Interview results include drivers and barriers from prospective users that we translated into requirements to increase the potential adoption and effective use of online platforms with similar components. From the experiences with implementing these requirements, we provide recommendations for enabling primary drivers: (i) Combining online and offline interactions to provide various options for knowledge exchange between disciplines and organisations. (ii) Sharing the content and application of the research with a non-scientific audience. (iii) Reusing existing online platforms as much as possible without restricting any to improve the reuse of research methods and results. We further provide recommendations to overcome the main barriers: (i) Partnering with various communities to extend knowledge exchange. (ii) Following a participatory approach to improve the design and content while considering the time and resources that such a process entails. (iii) Providing flexible options to contribute and tailor overviews of available knowledge in different ways according to prospective users' roles in practice. (iv) Purposefully facilitating online interactions according to the transdisciplinary process-intended attributes.@en

Calls for transformative change and participatory modes of knowledge production demand researchers to assume new roles. This paper synthesizes the literature on knowledge co-production and researcher roles to explore challenges for researchers involved in transdisciplinary environmental management projects. Our research methods combine a scoping review and reflections on personal experiences with three transdisciplinary projects. To conceptualize researcher roles in transdisciplinary knowledge co-production, we distinguish between three spaces: knowledge, formal policy, and stakeholder. Knowledge co-production requires collaboration between actors from different spaces and integration of diverse knowledge sources and types. Depending on whether researchers adopt knowledge-oriented, change-oriented or intermediating roles, they will experience different challenges. When researchers combine knowledge development with change-oriented and/or intermediating roles, they encounter new challenges, such as, maintaining independence or objectivity. To assist researchers in transdisciplinary projects, we conclude with a checklist of four elements to reflect upon: orientation, norms and values, expectations and resources.@en