EAGER: International Type II: A Team Science Examination of Virtual, Hybrid, and In-Person Strategies for Strengthening International Collaboration on Agritourism Research

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Part 1.The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a major weakness in international collaboration: the reliance on in-person academic conferences as a primary opportunity for scientists to network and collaborate. In response to travel restrictions and lockdowns, international research conferences have been forced to move online and collaborators have transitioned to remote means for connecting and continuing scholarly work. The sudden transition to extensive use of videoconferencing and digital tools for collaborative research came with unanticipated side effects, including coordination barriers, communication challenges, and heightened levels of burnout known as Zoom fatigue. Research is needed to better understand the benefits and challenges of participating in online versus in-person forums, and the resulting impacts on research collaborations and scholarly productivity. This is especially important for research areas that rely on place-based experiential learning such as agritourism, which is broadly understood to encompass the farm-community-tourism nexus in agroecosystems. The emerging research area of agritourism has profound implications for sustainable community development, local food systems, management of working landscapes, and ecosystem services. In addition to the direct benefits of strengthening collaborative international agritourism research, findings from this project will be documented and shared with a focus on lessons that are transferable to other fields seeking to strengthen future collaboration. The ultimate goal is to contribute to international research collaborations that are resilient, robust, and sustainable so they can withstand many types of disruptions, ranging from disease to war to natural disasters.Part 2.This project has four primary objectives: (1) strengthen the emerging international agritourism research collaboration by implementing a series of team development interventions including webinars, virtual networking, and a hybrid international conference that supports both online and in-person participation; (2) evaluate the effectiveness of different modalities of team engagement by examining the challenges, barriers, and opportunities presented by each mode and by measuring outputs such as collaborative publications, presentations, grant proposals, and additional scholarly products; (3) develop interdisciplinary scholarship around agritourism through undergraduate and graduate student engagement in team science implementation; and (4) assess the transferability of the results to other fields to support the development of transdisciplinary research collaborations with place-based elements and emphasis on resilience and sustainability of international collaborations. The research team will track and survey participants in project activities to document scholarly efforts, new collaborations, and benefits of using different modalities for international collaboration and research productivity. In addition to surveys, a series of social network analyses will be conducted to measure growth of collaborations and relationships within the field. Research productivity will be measured using co-authorship network analysis, bibliometric indices, submission of collaborative extramural funding, and student engagement across institutions. Findings will be assessed for transferability across disciplines, and knowledge will be advanced with respect to identifying barriers and challenges to collaboration and the methods that are most effective for enhancing engagement and productivity of international research collaborations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.