Participatory research engages a transdisciplinary team of stakeholders in all aspects of the research process. Such engagement can lead to shifts in the research design, as well as who is considered a participant. We detail our experiences of studying an evolving stakeholder network in the context of a 2.5-year transdisciplinary, participatory project. We show how participation leads to shifts in the network boundary overtime and how a transdisciplinary effort was needed to retrospectively redefine the network boundary. Through tacking back and forth between ethnographic insights, research aims, and modeling assumptions, the team eventually reached agreement on what determined network membership and how to code network members according to their timing and level of participation. Our account advances literature on boundary and modeling approaches to shifting, evolving networks by demonstrating how participatory transdisciplinarity can be both a driver of, and solution to, capturing the complexity of evolving networks.

参与式研究在研究过程的各个方面都与利益相关者的跨学科团队合作。这种参与可能会导致研究设计发生变化，以及谁被认为是参与者。我们将详细介绍在2.5年跨学科，参与性项目的背景下研究不断发展的利益相关方网络的经验。我们展示了参与如何导致网络边界的超时变化，以及如何需要跨学科的工作来回顾性地重新定义网络边界。通过在人种学见解，研究目标和建模假设之间反复研究，该团队最终就确定网络成员的方式以及如何根据参与时间和参与程度对网络成员进行编码达成了共识。