COHERENT: Studying the corona as a holistic environment

The solar corona and the heliosphere must be part of a single physical system, but because the dominant physical processes change dramatically from the magnetically-dominated low corona, through the sparsely-observed middle corona, and into the plasma flow-dominated outer corona and heliospheric interface, unified frameworks to study the corona as a whole are essentially nonexistent. Understanding how physical processes shape and drive the dynamics of the corona as a global system, on all spatiotemporal scales, is critical for solving many fundamental problems in solar and heliospheric physics. However, the lack of unifying observations and models has led to a fragmentation of the community into distinct regimes of plasma parameter space, largely clustering around regions where existing instrumentation has made observations widely available and where models can be sufficiently self-contained to be tractable. We describe COHERENT, the 'Corona as a Holistic Environment' Research Network, a focused effort to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborative research to develop frameworks for unifying existing and upcoming observations, theory, models, and analytical tools to study the corona as a holistic system.