Scientific meetings and conferences are a cornerstone of scientific culture. By bringing people together around a shared purpose, meetings serve as a platform for knowledge exchange and can often foster a sense of belonging. As some will argue, conferences can become “counterspaces” to affirm a person’s identity, provided they have adequate access to resources and support (Nakajima et al., 2024). From students to retirees, sci...

Diversity in ocean sciences lags far behind US demographics. A substantial body of research highlights barriers that limit the participation and success of students from underrepresented minoritized (URM) and other marginalized groups in STEM disciplines, and a wealth of studies highlight successful interventions that improve the persistence of these groups in STEM higher education. Despite this knowledge, over the past four d...

In his inaugural “The Oceanography Classroom” column for Oceanography in 2000, Dean McManus noted: “A particular challenge for higher education is to include more members of underrepresented groups in the study of the ocean. Fifteen years from now, 40% of the traditional undergraduate-​​age population will consist of these underrepresented groups, but today the ocean sciences have the lowest participation by underrepresented g...

Geoscience is plagued with structural and systemic barriers that prevent people of historically excluded groups from fully participating in, contributing to, and accruing the benefits of geosciences. A change in the culture of our learning and working environments is required to dismantle barriers and promote belonging, accessibility, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our field. Inspired by a session organized at th...

The lack of diversity in the ocean sciences is not a particularly big secret or a recent issue. In his inaugural column in 2000 for The Oceanography Classroom, Dean McManus wrote: “A particular challenge for higher education is to include more members of underrepresented groups in the study of the ocean. Fifteen years from now, 40% of the traditional undergraduate-age population will consist of these underrepresented groups, b...

Stationary boundaries of sedentary species may belie dynamic processes that form them. Our aim was to test an implication of an evolving body of theory, that such boundaries are manifestations of complex regulatory dynamics. On rocky shores of British Columbia, large‐scale field experiments altered the densities of predatory sea stars ( Pisaster ochraceus ), causing shifts in the location of the lower vertical boundaries of th...