The review, published in Gut Pathogens, was conducted using the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology and reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews. Investigators searched five bibliographic databases without date restrictions, then had pairs of reviewers independently select studies and extract data using 44 variables. They identified 210 records and included 29 studies published from 1984 through 2025. The evidence consisted of 25 case reports and four case series, making it geographically concentrated and dominated by individual clinical descriptions rather than prospective population-based studies.

Infective endocarditis was the leading clinical presentation, appearing in 19 of the 29 included studies, or 65.5%. A separate bacteremia series documented endocarditis in six of 23 episodes, while other studies described primary bacteremia without an identified source, meningitis, spontaneous bacterial peritonitis, septic arthritis, abscesses and additional systemic infections. Clinical colonic evaluation was reported in 22 studies, representing 75.9% of the evidence base. Among the 25 studies with any clinical or post-mortem colonic evaluation, neoplastic findings were documented in 17, or 68.0%. Adenocarcinoma accounted for findings in 11 studies, equivalent to 37.9% of all 29 studies, and adenomas were reported in six, or 20.7%.

Despite the frequent documentation of colonic tumors, the review found substantial gaps in regional evidence and in the implementation of recommended evaluations. Twenty-seven of the 29 studies, or 93.1%, explicitly or implicitly recommended subsequent assessment of the colon. Documented follow-up appeared more variable, particularly in institutional case series, and the available publications provided too little consistent information to estimate colonoscopy adherence, diagnostic yield, taxonomic patterns or clinical outcomes. No eligible evidence was identified in 24 of the 33 countries considered. The authors therefore call for prospective multicenter cohorts and regional registries to establish how often colonic evaluation occurs after invasive Streptococcus bovis/Streptococcus equinus complex infection, how frequently neoplasia is detected and how patients fare over time. Because the synthesis was designed to map evidence rather than combine results quantitatively, its findings characterize the regional literature but do not establish the frequency of colonic neoplasia among all patients with these infections.

Subject of Research: Regional evidence on invasive Streptococcus bovis/Streptococcus equinus complex infection and associated colonic neoplasia

Article Title: Invasive Streptococcus bovis/Streptococcus equinus complex infection and colonic neoplastic pathology in Latin America and the Caribbean: a scoping review

Article References: Ospina, J. D. U., Perez, T. A., Roldán, I. M., Vargas, D. S., Mora-Jibaja, E., Nati-Castillo, H. A., Saavedra-Torres, J. S., Hidalgo, M. J., & Izquierdo-Condoy, J. S. (2026). Invasive Streptococcus bovis/Streptococcus equinus complex infection and colonic neoplastic pathology in Latin America and the Caribbean: a scoping review. Gut Pathogens. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13099-026-00872-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13099-026-00872-y

Keywords: Streptococcus bovis, Streptococcus equinus, invasive infection, colonic neoplasia, colorectal adenocarcinoma, infective endocarditis, scoping review, Latin America, Caribbean, Invasive, Streptococcus, bovis

Following PRISMA guidelines, the researchers screened 665 records and examined 43 studies. The studies were assessed in three adaptation categories: hard engineering, ecosystem-based approaches and other adaptive strategies. The review considered patterns in effectiveness, suitability, acceptability, equity, opportunities and limitations. This is an evidence synthesis of studies from across the Caribbean, not a new field trial, so its conclusions identify recurring relationships and implementation challenges rather than demonstrating that one adaptation package will work in every location.

Hard engineering solutions provide immediate protection, according to the review. However, poorly planned or isolated structures can cause long-term ecological disruption, sediment imbalances and flooding problems, while generating high maintenance costs. The findings therefore caution against judging engineered measures only by the protection they provide at the outset. Their broader effects and continuing requirements must be considered when they are incorporated into coastal planning.

Healthy ecosystem-based approaches contribute to risk reduction and can provide multifunctional environmental benefits. Their performance is conditional, however, and depends on ecosystem condition, hazard intensity, local environmental conditions and long-term management. The review identifies these dependencies as important for assessing whether an ecosystem-based measure is suitable in a particular setting. It also finds that the potential of ecosystem-based adaptation has not been fully realized because the integration of engineered and ecosystem-based measures within participatory governance remains incomplete. Institutional fragmentation and inconsistent enforcement are among the constraints that restrict implementation.

Regional case studies reviewed in the assessment show that effective governance, data-driven planning and community engagement can strengthen coastal resilience. The review points to integrated early warning systems, hazard mapping and institutional coordination as elements of this approach. These measures are presented in connection with region-specific hazard information and coordinated decision-making, rather than as a universally transferable template. The authors conclude that sustainable coastal resilience in the Caribbean requires a co-created, multi-level strategy combining engineered defences, healthy coastal ecosystems and participatory governance. The scope of the evidence supports this integrated direction, but the variation in local hazards, environmental conditions, institutional capacity and management needs limits any single regional prescription.

Subject of Research: Systematic assessment of climate-induced coastal risks and adaptation strategies in the Caribbean Basin

Article Title: Assessment of climate-induced coastal risks and adaptation strategies in the Caribbean Basin

Article References: Ayoub, S., Nalakurthi, N. V. S. R., Renaud, S. S., Ahmed, T., Riaz, K., Trench, C., Villarroel-Lamb, D., & Gharbia, S. S. (2026). Assessment of climate-induced coastal risks and adaptation strategies in the Caribbean Basin. Natural Hazards, 122(22), Article 691. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-026-08451-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-026-08451-9

Keywords: Caribbean, coastal resilience, climate adaptation, hard engineering, ecosystem-based adaptation, coastal hazards, participatory governance, hazard mapping, early warning systems, Assessment, climate-induced, coastal

Lead author Min Zhao, a postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum of Natural History when the research was conducted, and his colleagues used DNA from dozens of barn owl specimens collected as early as 1876 and housed in 11 museums, including the Florida Museum, the American Museum, the Field Museum and Louisiana State University. The analysis combined genetic sequences with radiocarbon dates from fossils published in earlier studies to reconstruct approximate movements among regions. The evidence indicates that the lineage later named the American barn owl diversified in the Caribbean and then reached the mainland.

The Galápagos lineage apparently reached the islands directly from the Caribbean, skipping the Americas, before another, more recent barn owl colonization from South America established a population on San Cristóbal. The chronology points to an initial trans-Atlantic arrival from Europe or Asia during or shortly before the Pleistocene ice ages. The study rejected the earlier idea that barn owls crossed the ancient North Atlantic land bridge or traveled through Beringia before spreading through continental America and colonizing the Caribbean.

Steadman said these northern routes appeared unrealistic because barn owls are tropical and temperate and cannot readily handle high latitudes where snow obscures the meadow voles they hunt. The researchers therefore favored an oceanic crossing, although the evidence does not establish the precise route or circumstances of that journey. The reconstructed movements are approximate chronologies rather than observations of individual migrations.

Ocean crossings of this scale are unusual for barn owls, but long-distance dispersal is not without precedent. The authors noted that the Mediterranean plant genus Limonium, commonly called sea lavender, dispersed from its region of origin to Macaronesia and then on to the Caribbean. They also cited an account by English naturalist Mark Catesby, who saw an owl accompany his ship in 1722 while crossing the Atlantic at about 26 degrees north.

In an interview, study co-author David Steadman said that owls are good dispersers and that barn owls may be the best among them. The historical observation indicates that an owl can remain aloft far from land, but it does not demonstrate the route taken by the ancestors of the populations examined in the study. The fossil record suggests that the Caribbean was especially important in the owls’ early history.

Tyto pollens, a roughly meter-tall species that lived in Cuba and the Bahamas, may have inspired the Bahamian legend of the chickcharney, a giant elfin creature associated with luck and the disappearance of people who encounter it. Another exceptionally large form, the Hispaniolan giant barn owl, Tyto ostologa, lived on Hispaniola. Evidence from an archaeological site in the Lesser Antilles indicates that people encountered a giant owl there.

Both giant species probably disappeared within the past 1 million years, during the late Pleistocene or Holocene, although the precise dates of their extinction are not known. Steadman noted that many large Caribbean prey animals survived until people arrived in the region during the middle to late Holocene, raising the possibility that the giant owls also persisted until relatively late in prehistory. Their prey included hutias, a diverse group of large rodents, as well as monkeys, insectivores and other animals too large for an ordinary barn owl to manage.

The two or three largest forms may have been capable of taking a young Caribbean ground sloth. The disappearance of these prey communities, rather than deliberate hunting of elusive owls, was considered a plausible explanation for the owls’ subsequent losses. At least nine species that once inhabited the Caribbean are now extinct, leaving only a small fraction of its former barn owl diversity.

The Caribbean ground sloth was the last of the giant ground sloths to become extinct following the arrival of humans in the Americas, although it was smaller than its massive continental relatives. Most hutia species that lived on Caribbean islands were important prey for giant barn owls, and a fossil skull of an extinct hutia was found serving as a home for bees. Although the fossil record cannot provide a complete account of each owl population, the available evidence indicates that the region once supported an unusually diverse assemblage of barn owls.

The modern American barn owl is widespread across continental America, yet the most genetically divergent lineages are found in the Caribbean. The study also raises the possibility that some surviving island populations deserve greater taxonomic and conservation attention. The Caribbean-derived Galápagos population, now treated as a subspecies of the American barn owl, is genetically distinct and may warrant recognition as a species, according to the authors.

A little-known Caribbean barn owl subspecies in the Lesser Antilles may similarly be distinct, but it has received limited scientific attention because it was not previously considered endemic. In the Galápagos, the Caribbean lineage is now endemic to Isabela and Santa Cruz after being extirpated from Floreana. The proposed taxonomic changes are grounded in the study’s genetic evidence and have not been completed formal reclassifications.

Modern barn owls appear to be filling some of the ecological gaps left by extinct giants. In Hispaniola, the smaller American barn owl was first recorded in the mid-1900s, long after the giant T. ostologa disappeared. The surviving owl takes smaller prey that may include invasive rats, whereas the extinct giant depended on animals such as the island’s hutias, many of which were driven extinct by people.

A similar sequence may be unfolding in the Galápagos, where the ancient Caribbean-derived lineage coexists with a newer population that probably flew from South America and established itself on the populous island of San Cristóbal. The findings reverse the expected direction of colonization and connect the modern distribution of barn owls with the recent extinction of island lineages. Earlier paleontological work had produced no pre-Pleistocene barn owl fossils in the Western Hemisphere, leading some researchers to suspect that the birds arrived during the Pleistocene or, at the earliest, the Pliocene.

The new phylogeographic analysis instead identifies the most divergent lineages in the Caribbean, uses fossil timing to support a Caribbean origin for T. furcata, and indicates separate movements from the Caribbean to the Galápagos and the Americas. Genetic relationships and radiocarbon dates provide approximate dispersal windows rather than exact migration dates, but together they support a Caribbean chapter in barn owl evolution that had previously been overlooked. The peer-reviewed study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Subject of Research: Genetic reconstruction of the Caribbean origin and subsequent dispersal of Western Hemisphere barn owls

Article Title: Caribbean islands were once the center of diversity for barn owls

Article References: Caribbean islands were once the center of diversity for barn owls. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: barn owls, Caribbean, Galápagos, genetic analysis, fossil record, island biogeography, species extinction, taxonomy, phylogeography, American barn owl, islands, were

The stakes could hardly be higher. Freshwater ecosystems cover less than 0.8 percent of the Earth’s surface yet provide habitat for at least 6 percent of known species — and probably many more awaiting discovery. Since 1970, an estimated 84 percent of freshwater biodiversity has been lost, and nearly one species in three is now threatened with extinction across all taxa. Tropical islands like Martinique are particularly vulnerable: they combine low species diversity with high endemism on small areas, making their native communities exquisitely sensitive to disruption. Martinique, a rugged island in the Lesser Antilles with more than 70 permanent rivers, sits within one of the planet’s 25 biodiversity hotspots, yet its freshwater life remains poorly inventoried.

For decades, the standard tool for surveying freshwater fish has been electrofishing, a technique that uses electric currents to temporarily stun fish so they can be captured, identified and released. While effective, the method is stressful — sometimes harmful — to the organisms it targets, and it can disturb fragile ecosystems harboring small populations that researchers seek to protect. It is also labor-intensive and time-consuming, limiting its use across larger or more remote areas. In Martinique, these drawbacks have led to electrofishing being progressively abandoned for routine monitoring, creating an urgent need for an alternative that is both reliable and non-disruptive.

Enter environmental DNA. Organisms constantly shed genetic material into their surroundings — through skin cells, mucus and feces — and this DNA can be captured from water samples and sequenced to reveal which species are present, even at low population densities, without ever observing the animals directly. The approach can detect rare, cryptic or elusive taxa at any life stage, regardless of size or ecology, including species that live underground or in disconnected ditches. When combined with metabarcoding, which amplifies and sequences DNA from many species simultaneously, eDNA offers a non-disruptive, easily scalable alternative to traditional capture methods.

To test whether this molecular approach could work in Martinique’s challenging tropical conditions, the research team selected 14 stations spread from the island’s north to its south, chosen to represent the full diversity of its river systems. Each station was sampled in April 2023 by both eDNA filtration and electrofishing, with filtration performed first to minimize contamination risks. The team used two independent eDNA samples per station, filtered through 0.45-micrometer nitrocellulose membranes until clogging occurred — typically between one and 2.5 liters per replicate. Rigorous decontamination protocols, including 20 percent bleach treatment of sampling equipment and blank control samples of distilled water, were applied throughout to guard against false positives.

The molecular workflow was technically demanding. DNA was extracted from filter fragments in dedicated, bleach-disinfected rooms, and two-step PCRs were performed using two primer pairs: MiFish, targeting a 175-base-pair fragment of the mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene for fish, and MiDeca, targeting a 164-base-pair fragment of the mitochondrial 16S rRNA gene for crustaceans. Each eDNA sample was amplified four times, producing eight PCR reactions per station, with negative controls and three positive mock communities — equimolar mixes of DNA from 19 decapod and 27 fish species — used to calibrate taxonomic inference. Sequencing was carried out on an Illumina NextSeq 2000, generating over 11.6 million reads for fish and 14.8 million reads for decapods across the 14 stations. Bioinformatic processing with the DADA2 pipeline removed primers, merged paired-end reads, eliminated chimeras, and filtered out low-abundance sequences likely to represent contaminants or errors.

The results were striking. Electrofishing captured between one and seven fish species per station and three to seven decapod species, while eDNA metabarcoding detected between four and eleven fish species and four to nine decapod species. Statistically, eDNA detected significantly more fish species than electrofishing — 7.93 versus 4.28 on average — and more decapod species as well. Most importantly in a validation context, eDNA succeeded in detecting all fish species caught by electrofishing, sometimes reporting species never observed in the field. At one southern station, eDNA revealed seven fish species where electrofishing found only one. The molecular method also excelled at detecting hard-to-find species such as the tiny shrimp Jonga serrei, the introduced Neocaridina denticulata, and — more worryingly — the highly invasive red claw crayfish Cherax quadricarinatus at a northern station where it was previously unknown.

The study was not without limitations. The researchers could not confidently discriminate between two genetically close species of the goby genus Sicydium — S. plumieri and S. punctatum — despite extensive efforts to complete the genetic reference database, possibly due to the species’ extreme genetic similarity or even hybridization between them. Electrofishing, by contrast, was more effective at detecting certain decapods such as Xiphocaris elongata and Macrobrachium heterochirus, probably because these crustaceans shed DNA at lower rates than fish. The team also noted that visual identification during electrofishing can be confounded by morphological similarities between species, particularly among juvenile Macrobrachium and the small, almost transparent Atyidae shrimp, which include both native and introduced species.

Beyond simply counting species, the eDNA data allowed the team to assess the ecological state of each station using the Simpson index, a measure of species dominance and community evenness. Southern stations generally exhibited species-poor assemblages dominated by invasive taxa such as Oreochromis tilapia and C. quadricarinatus, with relatively low Simpson index values reflecting community homogenization. Northern stations, by contrast, harbored more diverse and evenly distributed communities composed largely of native species such as the mountain mullet Agonostomus monticola and Atya shrimp. Redundancy analysis revealed that north-south exposure was the most influential driver of community composition across all datasets, supported by Mantel tests showing that nearby stations host more similar communities. The southern rivers’ vulnerability to invasion likely reflects a combination of higher anthropogenic disturbance and greater propagule pressure from aquaculture and the ornamental trade.

The approach also updated occurrence records for several ecologically important species. It confirmed the presence of Martinique’s only endemic freshwater fish, Anablepsoides cryptocallus, at six stations and suggested its presence at two more. The cryptic mangrove rivulus Kryptolebias marmoratus, previously known from a single station, was detected at two new sites with plausible habitat characteristics — high conductivity and proximity to mangroves. More alarmingly, the study expanded the known invasion zone of C. quadricarinatus and potentially revealed several invasive Loricariidae catfish species on the territory where only one, Hypostomus robinii, had been documented. The researchers emphasize that eDNA should complement, not replace, traditional methods, which remain indispensable for biometric data, population densities and genetic studies. They call for harmonized eDNA protocols and encourage stakeholders to join the initiative, arguing that the molecular approach could shed light on rich biodiversity in poorly studied regions and facilitate the fight against invasive species — one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss worldwide.

Subject of Research: Metabarcoding outperforms traditional electrofishing in decapod and fish inventories, paving the way for enhanced biodiversity monitoring in the Caribbean

Article Title: Metabarcoding outperforms traditional electrofishing in decapod and fish inventories, paving the way for enhanced biodiversity monitoring in the Caribbean

Article References: Baudry, T., Vasselon, V., Delaunay, C., Arqué, A., Rateau, F., Lala, G., Maurice-Madelon, C., & Grandjean, F. (2025). Metabarcoding outperforms traditional electrofishing in decapod and fish inventories, paving the way for enhanced biodiversity monitoring in the Caribbean. Metabarcoding and Metagenomics, 9, Article e151675. https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.9.151675

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/mbmg.9.151675

Keywords: Metabarcoding, outperforms, traditional, electrofishing, decapod, fish, inventories, paving, enhanced, biodiversity, monitoring, Caribbean

The stakes could hardly be higher. The Neotropics encompass some of the planet’s most celebrated biodiversity hotspots, among them Mesoamerica, the Caribbean islands, the Tropical Andes, the Atlantic Forest and the Cerrado. They also underpin ecosystem services vital to humanity and to keeping planetary boundaries intact, most famously global climate regulation through the enormous carbon sinks of tropical rainforests and mountain ecosystems such as the páramos. The region’s Mayan, Amazonian and Andean forests make it, in the editors’ words, the most diverse and extensive germplasm bank worldwide. Compared with other realms, the Neotropics have remained relatively well preserved, partly thanks to low population density and vast inhospitable landscapes, but assessing and predicting human impacts is now of the utmost importance for any hope of sustainable coexistence with nature.

Why has so little been synthesized? The editors highlight a few key barriers. Political instability and limited economic resources allocated to science are significant obstacles: in 2020, Latin America and the Caribbean invested just 0.62 percent of regional income in science, against 3.32 percent in North America and 2.28 percent in the European Union. The sheer immensity of Neotropical biodiversity is itself a challenge, because integrated taxonomic studies are lacking and a high proportion of diversity is missing altogether. Ecuador and Peru, for example, could harbor up to 30 percent of the total missing species worldwide across all taxa, which hinders representative and comprehensive biological studies. Data availability, data access and language barriers further interfere with efforts to compile large repositories of Neotropical vegetation information.

The biogeographic complexity of the region only adds to the difficulty. The Neotropical realm was first described and classified by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1876, and numerous subsequent classifications based on plants, animals or both have followed ever since, with no clear consensus to this day. One recent proposal recognized 50 biogeographic provinces grouped into 11 regions, from Caribbean-Mesoamerica to Valdivean-Magellanian. At a finer scale, the region’s extraordinary vegetation diversity reflects its unique biogeography, the complex evolution of its mountain building and soils, its role as an immense floristic cradle, and more recently human interactions. The Andean páramo alone, covering some 25,000 square kilometers of tropical alpine habitat, harbors more than 500 plant communities.

Among the research papers, Zeballos and colleagues provide an integral classification of the vegetation types of the Arid Chaco in central-western Argentina. Working from 654 vegetation relevés, the team characterized the flora, endemism, chorotypes and life forms of the region’s main vegetation types and linked them to environmental gradients, ultimately identifying nine vegetation types, with xerophytic shrublands dominant. The authors highlighted the effects of historical and present land use, which confer a clear Chaquenian identity to this area.

Ávila-Akerberg and colleagues conducted extensive work on the classification and nomenclature of temperate forest types in Mexico, providing a comprehensive analysis and synthetic update of the nomenclature of sub-humid and temperate forests in the country. Their research found that vegetation classification proposals tend to standardize criteria and nest hierarchical integrations at various levels based on physiognomic, climatic, phenological and floristic attributes. Crucially, they established that physiognomy serves as a primary divider at broader scales, whereas floristics typically divides at finer scales. Their work calls for a complete inventory of the phytosociological associations of Mexico’s temperate forests.

Two further studies turn to the high Andean wetlands that dot the world’s longest mountain chain. Casagranda and Izquierdo modeled the potential distribution of vegas, high Andean wetlands dominated by rushes and sedges of the families Juncaceae and Cyperaceae, in the Argentine Puna. Their models predicted that Juncaceae-dominated vegas occur chiefly in the northern region, at high elevation and in humid, cold conditions, while Cyperaceae-dominated vegas were mostly predicted in the southern region, at lower elevation and in drier, hotter conditions, providing planning tools to understand vega distribution under changing environmental conditions. Maldonado-Fonkén and colleagues, meanwhile, sampled a nearly 70-kilometer transect across high-Andean bofedal wetlands in southern Peru, identifying seven different plant communities that often form cushion and mat vegetation, dominated by species such as Distichia muscoides, Werneria pygmaea, Plantago tubulosa and Plantago rigida, findings that highlight the bofedal diversity of the region and suggest new lines of research and management.

From a more systematic angle, Gopar-Merino and colleagues coupled cartographic approaches between bioclimatology and vegetation formations of Mexico, a first attempt to unravel the intricate interplay between climate and vegetation and to unify a system for depicting Mexican vegetation patterns. Using a combined geobotanical and bioclimatological approach, the authors identified 13 distinct bioclimatic classes which, when combined with physiognomic types, depicted 11 forest, three shrubland and three herbaceous biomes. Navarro and colleagues went further still, proposing an innovative synthesis of South American terrestrial biomes as geocomplexes, a geobotanical landscape approach that associates vegetation units at the landscape level and shows how they interact and are conditioned by climatic, topographic and edaphic gradients. Their conceptual framework views the biome as a landscape complex comprising vegetation geoseries that in turn comprise geomorphologically linked zonal and azonal vegetation series. Applying this framework to South America, they identified and synoptically characterized 33 geocomplex biomes and 16 macrobiomes, to be summarized in a dataset for the scientific community.

The Special Collection also promotes three new vegetation data initiatives registered in the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Databases. ArgVeg, the database of central Argentina, includes 1,092 vegetation-plot records containing 1,184 valid native and non-native vascular plant species as of September 2022, covering the main vegetation types of the Chaco, Espinal and Pampa and filling an important data gap. CACTUS, the vegetation database of the Dutch Caribbean Islands, currently contains 2,701 vegetation-plot records and can be used for vegetation classification in an undersampled region, tracking vegetation change over time, planning surveys, sourcing plant species distribution maps and informing conservation and policy. VegAndes, the vegetation database for the Latin American highlands, is the most extensive of the three: it compiles 5,340 vegetation plots sampled in 11 Latin American countries, with 5,804 taxon names, and spans over seven decades, supporting multi-scale studies in botany, ecology and biogeography, especially relevant given the impacts of climate change on vulnerable tropical mountains.

The collection suggests significant potential for collaboration among vegetation scientists from Latin America and the Caribbean and the IAVS journals. The IAVS regional section was launched in 2019 to connect researchers dedicated to vegetation science in the region, and it is expanding rapidly thanks to its broad regional interest and outreach. The group is currently conducting an extensive bibliometric review of regional works as an invited contribution to the Journal of Vegetation Science, an initiative that will help identify knowledge, geographical and topical gaps and promote new collaborations within and beyond the community. As global change reshapes vegetation in space and time, the growing need to understand those impacts is particularly urgent for the Neotropics, and it calls for rapid measures to improve data availability and research across this, the most phytodiverse realm on Earth.

Subject of Research: A special collection of nine studies delivers new vegetation classifications and databases for the Neotropics, Earth's most plant-diverse realm.

Article Title: Vegetation classification in the Neotropics – Novel insights from Latin America and the Caribbean

Article References: Peyre, G., Andrade, B. O., Velazquez, A., & Giorgis, M. A. (2024). Vegetation classification in the Neotropics – Novel insights from Latin America and the Caribbean. Vegetation Classification and Survey, 5, 219-223. https://doi.org/10.3897/vcs.133613

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/VCS.133613

Keywords: Vegetation, classification, Neotropics, Novel, insights, Latin, America, Caribbean, scientific research

The research, led by Laura Lovell and Natalie Greaves of The University of the West Indies in Barbados, together with Nachiappan Chockalingam of The University of Staffordshire and Nina Davies of The University of Staffordshire and Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust in the United Kingdom, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what do healthcare practitioners in Barbados actually know about the diabetic foot, and what do they feel they are missing? The stakes are high. Globally, gaps in the education of healthcare professionals regarding diabetes and diabetic foot disease have been well established, with many practitioners receiving diabetes-related education only during basic medical training and little or nothing thereafter. In Barbados, a small island developing state where the incidence of diabetes continues to climb, that gap has never been formally addressed.

To understand the problem from the inside, the team turned to qualitative research methods. Between June 2023 and February 2024, they conducted nine focus groups with healthcare professionals and non-governmental stakeholders drawn from both public and private healthcare settings across Barbados. The analysis was grounded in an interpretivist philosophical paradigm with constructivist theory, meaning the researchers treated knowledge as something built through experience and dialogue rather than simply measured with questionnaires. Thematic analysis was used to organise what participants said into meaningful patterns, a technique that allows researchers to identify recurring ideas, tensions and aspirations within large volumes of conversational data.

Three major themes emerged from the analysis, and together they tell a striking story about the state of diabetic foot care in Barbados. The first theme, which the researchers called The Gaps, encapsulated the shortfalls in healthcare practitioners’ knowledge that acted as barriers to good diabetes care. The second theme, The Discord, captured a tension that will be familiar to clinicians across much of the world: the friction between evidence-based medicine and alternative medicine, known locally as bush medicine. The third theme, The Vision, reflected the felt need of how diabetic foot education for healthcare practitioners should actually be offered, from the perspective of the potential users themselves. Rather than designing a curriculum in isolation, the researchers let the people who would deliver and receive the training shape its form.

What makes this study technically interesting is how it converted qualitative findings into a rigorous educational framework. The organising themes from the focus groups were mapped against the guidance of the International Working Group on the Diabetic Foot, the global reference body for diabetic foot management. This mapping exercise allowed the team to identify minimum competencies, the specific skills and knowledge areas that any credible diabetic foot curriculum must cover. In total, the resulting programme supports eleven minimum competencies, ensuring that the curriculum is anchored to internationally accepted standards rather than local opinion alone.

The curriculum that emerged from this process is called BDFS-LEARN, and its architecture reflects decades of research into how adults actually learn. Its constructs are aligned to Adult Learning Theory, which holds that adult learners engage best when material is relevant to their daily practice and builds on their existing experience, and to Bloom’s Taxonomy, the classic hierarchy that moves learners from basic recall of facts through application to higher-order analysis and evaluation. Expert validation informed the final content, meaning that specialists in diabetic foot care reviewed and refined the modules before they were finalised. The result is a curriculum that is theoretically grounded, clinically validated and locally informed, a combination that educational researchers rarely achieve in a single programme.

Delivery is deliberately hybrid, a design choice with particular relevance for resource-limited settings. The programme consists of a 90-minute self-guided online component followed by a four-hour in-person workshop for skill refinement. The online portion includes eight modules, allowing practitioners to absorb foundational knowledge at their own pace and on their own schedules, which matters enormously for busy clinicians juggling clinics, ward rounds and family commitments. The in-person module then provides the hands-on practice that foot care demands, from assessing pulses and sensation to grading ulcerations and planning referrals. Together, the eight online modules and one in-person module create a learning experience that is culturally appropriate, acceptable and accessible for the Barbadian context.

The cultural dimension is not a decorative afterthought; it is central to the study’s contribution. The Discord theme revealed that any Barbadian diabetic foot education programme must reckon with bush medicine, the traditional remedies that many patients and even some practitioners turn to alongside or instead of conventional treatment. A curriculum that ignores this reality risks being dismissed as irrelevant, while one that engages with it thoughtfully can build bridges between evidence-based practice and the beliefs patients bring to the clinic. By surfacing this tension through focus groups rather than pretending it does not exist, the researchers have built a programme that meets Barbadian healthcare practitioners where they actually stand.

The implications reach well beyond one island. Barbados is classified as a small island developing state, a category that encompasses many territories facing similar combinations of rising diabetes prevalence, limited specialist resources and small healthcare workforces. The researchers argue that the BDFS-LEARN curriculum has potential relevance to other resource-limited settings, offering a template for how other nations might map their own education needs and build culturally grounded programmes. The methodology itself, from the interpretivist focus groups to the mapping against International Working Group on the Diabetic Foot guidance, is a transferable blueprint that education planners anywhere could adapt.

For patients, the ultimate promise is earlier detection and better prevention of the ulcers and amputations that make diabetic foot disease so feared. For practitioners, it is the first structured pathway to continuous medical education in diabetic foot care that their healthcare system has ever offered. And for the global medical education community, the study demonstrates that rigorous, theory-driven curriculum design can emerge from nine focus groups on a small Caribbean island and still meet international standards. The study received no external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests, with ethical approval obtained from the University of the West Indies and Ministry of Health and Wellness of Barbados Ethics Committee in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. As diabetes rates continue to climb worldwide, this Barbadian experiment may prove to be a model worth watching.

Subject of Research: Medical Education

Article Title: Continuous medical education for the diabetic foot adapted for a Caribbean context

Article References: Lovell, L., Chockalingam, N., Davies, N., & Greaves, N. (2026). Continuous medical education for the diabetic foot adapted for a Caribbean context. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10423-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10423-3

Keywords: diabetic foot, Barbados, continuing medical education, BDFS-LEARN, medical education, Caribbean, diabetes, curriculum design, Continuous, medical, education, diabetic

The findings, published in Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability, come from the Guyana pilot of the Prevention of Marine Litter in the Caribbean Sea, or PROMAR, project, an initiative funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety and implemented by adelphi in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme’s Cartagena Convention Secretariat. Led by Temitope D. Timothy Oyedotun and colleagues at the University of Guyana’s Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences, the pilot targeted four flood-prone communities along the East Coast Demerara corridor: Mon Repos, De Endragt, Good Hope and Lusignan. These settlements sit amid an extensive network of drainage canals and sluices that discharge directly into nearshore Atlantic waters, making them critical chokepoints where land-based plastic can be caught before it reaches the ocean.

What makes the Guyana pilot scientifically notable is not any single device but the integrated design. The researchers adopted a mixed-methods, systems-based framework grounded in the source-pathway-receptor model, combining household material flow analysis, knowledge-attitudes-practices surveys, physical waste interception, beach litter assessments and participatory stakeholder engagement across four sequential phases: baseline diagnostics, intervention deployment, monitoring and evaluation, and synthesis of policy lessons. A stratified random sample of 417 households, drawn from the 2022 national census enumeration districts and yielding a 95 percent confidence level with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8 percent, provided the behavioral backbone of the study. Survey instruments, adapted from UNEP guidelines and validated through expert review and pilot testing, achieved strong internal consistency, with reliability coefficients ranging from 0.78 to 0.85 across the knowledge, attitudes and practice scales.

The material flow analysis revealed a portrait of consumption and disposal that explains why Guyana’s beaches are so heavily polluted. Nearly 77 percent of surveyed households regularly used 19-liter plastic water jugs, 46.5 percent consumed four or more plastic beverage bottles per week, and more than half reported using plastic cooking oil containers. Meanwhile, waste management remained strikingly inadequate: 42 percent of respondents practiced no waste separation at all, only 6.7 percent used a professional garbage collection service, and roughly one in ten households either dumped garbage regularly or burned it weekly. Guyana ranks among the top ten countries globally for per-capita mismanaged plastic waste entering the ocean, with an estimated leakage rate of approximately 1.59 kilograms per person per year.

To quantify the leakage directly, the team built low-cost floating waste booms from locally sourced materials, including 40-millimeter polypropylene rope and HDPE shrimp netting, and installed them at three major drainage catchments. The booms extended 8 to 12 meters across canal widths, angled at 45 degrees to the flow to reduce hydraulic drag, and were checked daily. Between March and November 2025, the traps collected 113,399 kilograms of waste, of which plastics accounted for 59,466 kilograms, or 52.4 percent. The composition matched the household survey data almost exactly: plastic bags and films made up 31.5 percent of intercepted plastics, mixed packaging 39 percent, HDPE containers 16 percent and PET bottles 13.5 percent. The Mon Repos/Good Hope site, positioned where two large drainage channels converge near a pumping station, proved the most productive, capturing 94,432 kilograms overall, including a remarkable 26,540 kilograms during a single high-rainfall event in June 2025.

Statistical analysis confirmed what the raw numbers suggested. Interception efficiency varied significantly across sites, and monthly interception volumes showed a strong positive trend tied to precipitation patterns, with a Spearman correlation of 0.71 between rainfall and plastic mass intercepted. Boom efficiency ranged from 1.8 to 4.3 kilograms per meter of canal width per day, peaking during the June and November discharge periods. Perhaps most strikingly, the researchers found that these simple prototypes, built from rope, netting, bamboo and elastic anchors, outperformed more expensive mechanical collection systems in several instances, while avoiding the risks such machines can pose to aquatic fauna. Because the traps can be deployed and maintained by community groups or neighborhood councils, the team argues they offer a genuinely sustainable path for data-poor coastal states.

The circular economy component of the pilot translated diagnosis into action. Four decentralized waste-to-value hubs, one in each community, were established to collect, sort and aggregate recyclable plastics, which were then processed at the University of Guyana’s Circular Economy Innovation Lab using shredders, injection molds and additive manufacturing. A waste-for-token exchange scheme allowed residents and schools to trade sorted plastics for non-cash rewards such as school supplies and household items. The researchers found that this incentive mechanism, modest though it was, stabilized material flows into the processing stage and reinforced consistent sorting behavior, consistent with behavioral economics research showing that visible infrastructure and non-monetary nudges can reshape everyday choices. While proceeds from recyclables and souvenir sales do not yet cover the cost of rewards and logistics, the team expects that growing volumes and improved sorting efficiency will eventually bring the scheme toward cost recovery.

The behavioral results were equally striking. Three major coastal cleanups between April and September 2025 mobilized 173 volunteers and removed roughly 1,306 kilograms of debris from Unity Beach, the Kingston Seawall and No. 63 Beach. Post-activity surveys of 121 participants at the largest event revealed mean understanding scores of 10 out of 10 for marine litter and its impacts, unanimous agreement that the problem demands immediate action, and strong intentions to change daily habits, with mean scores of 9.6 for behavioral change and future participation. Across the full study, a significant positive point-biserial correlation between knowledge-attitudes-practices scores and regular hub visits confirmed that improved awareness translates into action. School programs reached 133 students across three schools, where 97 percent of children identified themselves as ocean helpers after participating in waste-sorting games.

The policy dimension may prove the most consequential. The project delivered a national policy brief on marine litter prevention to Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency, drafted an Extended Producer Responsibility framework and a draft national deposit-refund scheme for plastic bottles and packaging, and contributed technical input to the review of Guyana’s Solid Waste Management Bill. A National Dialogue on Marine Litter Prevention in May 2025 brought together government agencies, civil society and technical partners, while a collaboration with UNEP-GRID Geneva and the University of Geneva is building a regional marine litter monitoring platform. Because PET, HDPE and other packaging plastics dominate the intercepted waste streams, the researchers argue that upstream instruments such as EPR, which shifts responsibility for post-consumer waste from municipalities to producers, are essential for sustaining and scaling prevention efforts.

The Guyana pilot offers a replicable model for coastal states across the Caribbean and beyond, where shoreline litter densities of 2,000 to 3,900 items per kilometer far exceed global averages. Its central lesson is that drainage systems are leverage points where small technological investments yield large reductions in leakage, that community-anchored incentives can sustain participation even where money is scarce, and that technical fixes succeed only when woven into education, behavioral change and multi-actor governance. The authors acknowledge limitations, including a short monitoring window and reliance on self-reported behavior, and caution that long-term success depends on stable financing, regulatory support and inclusive stakeholder participation. But the evidence from this flood-prone coastline suggests something quietly revolutionary: that marine litter prevention is both technically feasible and socially achievable when communities are equipped not just with bins and booms, but with ownership of the solution itself.

Subject of Research: Circular economy-based prevention of land-based marine plastic litter in Guyana's coastal communities

Article Title: Systematic-based approach to marine litter prevention in coastal environment: lessons and successes from the PROMAR project implementation in Guyana

Article References: Oyedotun, T. D. T., Hamer, S., Persaud, C., & Johnson-Bhola, L. (2026). Systematic-based approach to marine litter prevention in coastal environment: lessons and successes from the PROMAR project implementation in Guyana. Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability, 4, Article 1859998. https://doi.org/10.3389/focsu.2026.1859998

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/focsu.2026.1859998

Keywords: marine litter, plastic pollution, circular economy, Guyana, Caribbean, PROMAR, waste interception, Extended Producer Responsibility, community engagement, drainage canals, behavioral change, coastal management

The geopolitical stakes are considerable. Estimates cited in the article suggest quantum technologies will contribute more than USD 1 trillion to the global economy by 2035, and the World Economic Forum’s Quantum Economy Blueprint warns that countries lacking coordinated quantum strategies will face structural vulnerabilities limiting their participation in the emerging quantum economy. The anticipated moment when quantum algorithms will be capable of breaking widely used cryptographic standards—often labeled Quantum Decryption Day, or QDay—signals not only a technical disruption but a structural reordering of global power. For small island states, whose vulnerabilities include geographical isolation, fragile energy grids, exposure to climate-driven disasters, and dependence on external digital infrastructures, the risks are amplified. The study argues that small states are disproportionately exposed to quantum asymmetries but also possess the potential to leverage quantum technologies as strategic equalizers, particularly in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure optimization, provided their national innovation systems are integrated into global value chains and capable of developing specialized niches.

The QSG is defined as the structural misalignment between a jurisdiction’s constitutional authority, its digital and scientific capabilities, and the infrastructural, regulatory, and algorithmic requirements of the quantum era. Crucially, the framework builds on the WEF’s position that quantum sovereignty does not depend on owning quantum hardware but on securing a strategic position in the quantum value chain, including access to critical infrastructures, post-quantum cryptographic standards, and specialized human capital. The study distinguishes this from adjacent concepts: the digital divide refers to disparities in access to connectivity and devices; technological dependency describes reliance on external industrial ecosystems; and digital, data, and cyber sovereignty each address specific layers of control over infrastructures, data flows, and network governance. None of these frameworks fully capture the quantum-specific vulnerabilities associated with cryptographic collapse, quantum-enabled optimization, or the geopolitical concentration of quantum hardware and cloud infrastructures.

The comparative Policy Gap Audit reveals stark asymmetries between the two territories. Puerto Rico scores 1 on infrastructure sovereignty, reflecting heavy reliance on U.S.-based FedRAMP cloud providers that ensure compliance with federal cybersecurity standards but limit the development of autonomous quantum-ready nodes. The Dominican Republic scores 2 on this dimension, driven by its Sovereign Artificial Intelligence initiative and an NVIDIA Memorandum of Understanding that explicitly mandates the creation of Sovereign AI infrastructure and local data hosting, signaling early movement toward computational autonomy. On knowledge sovereignty, Puerto Rico scores 0, as its industrial policy remains oriented toward external funding and multinational corporate needs with limited endogenous quantum research and development, while the Dominican Republic scores 1, demonstrating emerging capability formation through the NVIDIA Academy and targeted training pathways. Both jurisdictions score 1 on systemic resilience, regulatory readiness, and implementation friction, with neither integrating quantum-enabled optimization or high-performance computational modeling into resilience strategies.

The most critical shared vulnerability is regulatory. Puerto Rico’s Law 40-2024 mandates NIST-standard encryption but does not define a timeline for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration, while the Dominican Republic’s National Cybersecurity Strategy prioritizes cryptography yet omits quantum-resistant protocols. Neither jurisdiction has articulated timelines, institutional coordination mechanisms, or technical requirements for PQC migration, representing a critical vulnerability given global store-now-decrypt-later risks, in which encrypted data harvested today can be decrypted once quantum capabilities mature. The study is careful to note that PQC migration does not require sovereign quantum infrastructure; it depends primarily on institutional readiness, regulatory coordination, and the modernization of existing public-key infrastructures. What sovereign control does influence is the degree of autonomy with which jurisdictions can implement, govern, and secure these transitions without relying on external cloud providers, foreign standards, or non-sovereign computational architectures.

Knowledge asymmetries constitute one of the most consequential dimensions of the gap, and the study documents two distinct modalities of brain drain. Puerto Rico maintains one of the strongest STEM talent pipelines in the Caribbean, producing between 10,000 and 12,000 graduates annually, with the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and Río Piedras accounting for more than 60 percent of academic R&D expenditure and graduating 1,500 to 2,000 engineers and computer scientists per year. Yet 25 to 35 percent of this high-skill cohort migrates annually to U.S. national laboratories, federal agencies, and deep-tech industries, with outward migration surging after Hurricane María in 2017 and stabilizing above 600 specialized professionals annually by 2025. The result is a paradox of excellence: the island generates quantum-relevant talent but lacks the industrial absorptive capacity to retain it. The Dominican Republic exhibits a more contemporary modality—intangible or virtual brain drain—where STEM programs represent only 15 to 18 percent of total university enrollment and the country has fewer than 100 full-time equivalent researchers per million inhabitants, yet since 2021 a permanent block of cross-border remote digital work has emerged in which high-tier developers and data scientists, while physically located in Santo Domingo, are contracted exclusively by foreign multinationals, strengthening external innovation ecosystems without contributing to domestic R&D, taxation, or intellectual-property registers.

Infrastructural vulnerability further compounds the gap. The study’s FLE tri-diversity assessment shows that Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic are the only Caribbean territories with full tri-diversity—redundant submarine cables, terrestrial fiber loops, and satellite gateways—with Puerto Rico exhibiting the strongest quantum-ready profile in the region through systems including ARCOS-1, SAm-1, CFX-1, the U.S. backbone, MAYA-1, and Columbus-II. However, neither territory meets sub-minute failover requirements for mission-critical systems, and extreme events such as Hurricanes María, Georges, and Fiona demonstrate that blackout and black-sky conditions can disable physical infrastructure for days or weeks, undermining continuity thresholds required for quantum-safe replication and quantum key distribution. Hurricane María produced a 100 percent power outage, approximately 95 percent of cellular towers offline, and an estimated $80 to $95 billion in economic losses, with full grid restoration taking roughly 11 months.

Despite these structural constraints, the study identifies emerging scientific and entrepreneurial assets in both jurisdictions. The Department of Physics at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez hosts the Quantum Materials Dynamics Laboratory, where a faculty member secured a US$1 million Army Research Office grant to investigate ultrafast control of quantum phases in superconducting materials, work with direct applications in quantum information science. Venture capital flows from Silicon Valley have materialized through investments from Softbank and 305 Ventures, which jointly allocated approximately one million dollars to local startups Raincoat and Beauty911, while platforms such as Parallel18, Endeavor, and the Bravo Family Foundation have expanded access to global investment networks. In the Dominican Republic, a recent national diagnostic on semiconductor physics and applied electronics outlines growing academic and technological capacities, including university programs in physics and electrical engineering, early development of microelectronic laboratories, and strategic proposals for fabless design, OSAT-based manufacturing, and cleanroom infrastructure, though the country lacks semiconductor manufacturing capacity and relies instead on assembly, testing, and limited fabless design.

The study concludes that quantum readiness will depend less on formal sovereignty and more on the ability to mobilize talent, govern data, and finance resilient computational infrastructures. It identifies a potential regional opportunity through a proposed Puerto Rico–Dominican Republic Quantum Corridor, a binational platform capable of coordinating investment, harmonizing regulatory approaches, and pooling scientific and industrial capabilities. Puerto Rico’s research infrastructure and diaspora-linked venture networks, combined with the Dominican Republic’s emerging digital industrial strategy and expanding entrepreneurial ecosystem, create complementary strengths that neither jurisdiction possesses alone. Recent policy signals reinforce this trajectory: during the Third Ministerial Summit on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence held in Santo Domingo in June 2026, ministers from across Latin America and the Caribbean approved the Declaración de Santo Domingo and a regional roadmap for 2026–2027, emphasizing cooperation, interoperable governance mechanisms, talent development, and coordinated regulatory approaches—precisely the institutional conditions the study argues are required for quantum-ready governance. The quantum transition, the article argues, is not merely a technological shift but a redefinition of sovereignty itself, and for Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic the stakes are existential.

Subject of Research: Quantum sovereignty and constitutional asymmetry: mapping the sovereignty gap in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic

Article Title: Quantum sovereignty and constitutional asymmetry: mapping the sovereignty gap in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic

Article References: Orengo-Serra, K. L. (2026). Quantum sovereignty and constitutional asymmetry: mapping the sovereignty gap in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, Article 1885922. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1885922

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1885922

Keywords: Quantum Sovereignty Gap, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Post-Quantum Cryptography, QDay, Small Island Developing States, FedRAMP, NVIDIA Sovereign AI, Brain Drain, Quantum Corridor, Digital Sovereignty, Caribbean

The reason this single record matters so much lies in a stubborn asymmetry of sea turtle biology. Nesting females are, in a sense, the easiest turtles in the world to study. They haul themselves onto beaches in predictable numbers, dig conspicuous nests, and obligingly present themselves to teams of researchers who count, measure, and tag them season after season. Males never come ashore. Once hatchlings reach the sea, male sea turtles may not touch land again for decades, remaining fully aquatic and eluding the beach-based monitoring programs that have generated nearly everything science knows about sea turtle demography. As a result, adult males are among the least studied segments of any sea turtle population, and basic questions about where they live, how long they stay near breeding grounds, how often they return to mate, and how many reproductively active males are available in a given season remain largely unanswered, especially for hawksbills in the Caribbean.

Those questions are not academic curiosities. The number and availability of reproductively active males during a breeding season determine what ecologists call the operational sex ratio, a measure of the ratio of fertilizable females to sexually active males in a population. The operational sex ratio shapes mating competition, influences reproductive success, and feeds directly into estimates of population viability. Male behavior also underpins gene flow and patterns of multiple paternity, which have been documented in marine turtles through genetic studies showing that females may mate with several males across a season. If males are scarce, or if they visit breeding areas only intermittently, the reproductive output of a rookery could be affected in ways that female-focused nesting counts would never reveal. Understanding males is therefore essential to managing populations, particularly in key regions such the Caribbean Sea, where the hawksbill, a critically endangered species, still nests on scattered beaches.

The Gulf of Paria is exactly the kind of place where such knowledge is needed. Its hawksbill rookery ranks as the second largest for the species in the southern Caribbean Sea, yet it has shown worrying nesting declines in earlier assessments, raising questions about the population’s long-term prospects. Venezuelan sea turtle research has historically concentrated on nesting females, whether leatherbacks on the Paria Peninsula, green turtles at Aves Island, or the hawksbills of the Gulf of Paria itself. In-water research, the approach that can actually reach males, has been almost entirely absent from the country; the only comparable neritic study to date focused on hawksbill habitat in Los Roques Archipelago National Park. Against that backdrop, a team led by Clemente Balladares of Universidad Central de Venezuela, together with Marco Garcia-Cruz, José Alio, and Hector Barrios-Garrido, set out in April 2023 to gather whatever preliminary data they could on adult male hawksbills near the rookery, publishing their findings in Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science.

Their method combined two deliberately separate sampling streams. The first was researcher-led: stationary net hauls conducted roughly every two weeks off Los Garzos Bay, adjacent to the main nesting beach. Each net, measuring 100 meters long by 10 meters deep with a fine 15-centimeter mesh, was set perpendicular to the coastline about 50 meters offshore in water 4 to 12 meters deep, and each two-hour haul began after sunrise, between 5 and 7 in the morning. Of 40 planned hauls, 33 were completed between April 2023 and November 2024, with the rest cancelled by rough seas or drifting Sargassum mats, yielding 60 hours of effective sampling effort. The second stream was fishery-dependent: from September 2023 to June 2025, trained local assistants validated reports from artisanal fishers landing their catch near Aricagua Bay, Calera, and the Las Garcitas Islets, recording species, measurements, photographs, gear type, tag numbers, and the condition of any turtles caught incidentally. The two datasets were never pooled, because their designs, effort levels, and detection probabilities differ too much to support combined analyses of abundance or residency.

Every captured turtle was brought aboard, disentangled, measured for curved carapace length and width, checked for injuries and buoyancy problems, and kept shaded and wet to minimize stress. Sexing an adult male relies on a visible anatomical signal: the tail of a mature male grows long enough to extend well beyond the rear edge of the carapace, a secondary sexual characteristic absent in females and juveniles. Turtles without tags received new Inconel tags on both front flippers, and photographs of carapace, head, and tags were taken before release to support future photo-identification. The research-led surveys captured nine turtles in total, six juvenile green turtles, one adult male green turtle, and two adult male hawksbills, for a capture rate of 0.15 turtles per hour. Meanwhile, the validated fishery records documented 15 incidental captures involving three gear types: stationary nets, single hooks, and a 250-meter longline, with stationary nets accounting for most reports.

The headline result came from one of those two male hawksbills. Tagged as V001M and V002M on 26 June 2023 in Los Garzos Bay, with a curved carapace length of 75 centimeters and width of 64 centimeters, he was recaptured on 22 June 2025 near the Las Garcitas Islets after becoming entangled in an artisanal longline. By then only one of his original tags remained, but tag V001M was enough to confirm his identity; he received two new tags and was released in good condition, his measurements essentially unchanged and his elongated tail again confirming his status as an adult male. Crucially, the recapture date fell at the peak of the nesting season, and the research team had also repeatedly observed solitary hawksbills and small groups of up to four individuals surfacing and engaging in courtship and mating near the Las Garcitas Islets during their surveys. Together, these observations provide the first preliminary evidence that adult male hawksbills occur in the Los Garzos Bay–Las Garcitas area during the breeding period, close to the rookery they would presumably serve.

The authors are careful, however, about what this record does and does not prove. A single recapture, however evocative, cannot demonstrate continuous residency, seasonal site fidelity, remigration periodicity, local male abundance, or reproductive connectivity between the males and the nesting females of the rookery. The fishery-dependent reports are opportunistic and subject to unknown reporting bias, so they document interactions rather than distribution. Two competing hypotheses now frame the next phase of work: either some adult males return repeatedly to the area across successive breeding seasons, or they appear only in breeding years separated by one or more skipped seasons, which would also produce a multi-year gap between sightings. Both possibilities echo questions better studied in male green and loggerhead turtles, whose breeding periodicity and breeding-area fidelity have been examined in places like the southern Great Barrier Reef. Environmental context may matter too: the Gulf of Paria’s anticyclonic circulation could help retain turtles locally, while seasonal productivity peaks during the June-to-November rainy season may shape the availability of the sponges and other benthic prey that hawksbills favor. A separate, remarkable record adds regional texture: a hawksbill originally tagged in Puerto Rico was recovered in Los Garzos Bay some 1,200 kilometers away, showing that at least some turtles using the gulf participate in much broader regional movements.

Turning to the future, the team argues that these findings justify neither immediate fishery closures nor the formal designation of the area as confirmed male habitat. Instead, they position the Las Garcitas Islets–Los Garzos Bay zone as a candidate site for targeted monitoring and participatory risk assessment with local fishers. Because the focal male was recaptured in fishing gear, the priority actions are practical: strengthening fisher reporting networks, promoting safe handling and release protocols, training crews, systematically documenting gear interactions, and encouraging photographic records of every capture. The researchers also lay out the technical toolkit needed to move from anecdote to evidence: satellite telemetry to trace male movements and residence times, multi-season mark–recapture programs to estimate abundance and fidelity, photo-identification to track individuals non-invasively, and genetic analyses to test whether the males near Las Garcitas actually fertilize clutches on the adjacent nesting beaches. Funding from the New England Aquarium’s Marine Conservation Action Fund, the International Sea Turtle Society, and Conservation Connect supported the work, and the collaboration of Macuro’s fishing communities proved indispensable at every step.

For now, one turtle’s two-year journey of barely two kilometers stands as a small, hard-won data point in a vast gap of knowledge. But its implications ripple outward. If male hawksbills gather near rookeries during breeding seasons, then the waters adjacent to nesting beaches, precisely the zones where artisanal fisheries operate, may be critical habitat that current conservation frameworks, built almost entirely around beaches and nesting females, simply do not see. Every additional recapture, every validated fisher report, and every satellite track from the Gulf of Paria will help determine whether the Gulf’s males are loyal residents of these shallow waters or intermittent visitors from distant foraging grounds, and whether protecting them requires seasonal measures negotiated with the very fishers whose nets and lines keep bringing these ghostly males back into view.

Subject of Research: First local flipper-tag recapture of an adult male hawksbill turtle near the Gulf of Paria rookery in Venezuela

Article Title: First local flipper-tag recapture of a male hawksbill turtle near a major rookery in the Gulf of Paria, Venezuela

Article References: Balladares, C., Garcia-Cruz, M., Alio, J., & Barrios-Garrido, H. (2026). First local flipper-tag recapture of a male hawksbill turtle near a major rookery in the Gulf of Paria, Venezuela. Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science, 4, Article 1818436. https://doi.org/10.3389/famrs.2026.1818436

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/famrs.2026.1818436

Keywords: hawksbill turtle, sea turtles, male sea turtle ecology, mark-recapture, Gulf of Paria, Venezuela, operational sex ratio, artisanal fisheries, bycatch, rookery, Caribbean, conservation

Trace metals are a deceptively complicated class of contaminants. Unlike organic pollutants that eventually degrade, elements such as lead and cadmium persist indefinitely in the environment, cycling between water, sediment, and living tissue. At vanishingly small concentrations some of them, like zinc and copper, are actually essential micronutrients for marine organisms, while all four become toxic above certain thresholds. The challenge for monitoring programs is that dissolved metal concentrations in seawater are extraordinarily low, often fractions of a microgram per liter, and they fluctuate with tides, currents, and seasonal runoff. That is why many researchers prefer to read the chemical history of a coastline through its organisms. Brown algae in particular are famous bioaccumulators: their cell walls are rich in polysaccharides such as alginates and fucoidans that bind dissolved metal ions with remarkable efficiency, effectively concentrating metals from thousands of liters of water into a few grams of tissue. Seagrasses, rooted in sediment and bathed in the same water, provide a complementary signal that integrates both dissolved and sedimentary metal pools.

The Cuban team’s sampling design exploited this biology. At four beaches within the park, they collected specimens of Padina pavonica, Turbinaria tricostata, Dictyota dichotoma, Sargassum buxifolium, and the free-floating pelagic Sargassum natans, along with the two dominant Caribbean seagrasses, Thalassia testudinum, commonly known as turtle grass, and Syringodium filiforme, or manatee grass. Water samples were handled according to international ISO standards for preservation and handling, a detail that matters enormously in trace metal work, where contamination from sampling gear or storage containers can swamp the signal being measured. Dissolved metals in the seawater were quantified using square-wave anodic stripping voltammetry, an electrochemical technique prized for its sensitivity at the microgram-per-liter level. The technique works by plating dissolved metal ions onto an electrode under an applied potential and then stripping them off again, measuring the current generated as each metal is released, which produces a characteristic fingerprint of concentration for each element.

The plant and algal samples followed a different analytical route. After digestion, metal contents were determined by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry, or ICP-OES, a workhorse technique in which a plasma torch heated to roughly 10,000 Kelvin atomizes the sample and excites its constituent elements, causing them to emit light at wavelengths specific to each metal. The intensity of that emitted light translates directly into concentration. From these paired measurements of water and tissue, the researchers calculated bioaccumulation factors, or BAFs, which express how many times more concentrated a metal is inside an organism than in the surrounding water. A high BAF signals either efficient uptake by the organism or high bioavailability of the metal in its dissolved form, and comparing BAFs across species and sites is one of the standard ways ecotoxicologists gauge environmental quality without needing to deploy costly continuous chemical sensors.

The seawater results themselves tell a story of a relatively pristine environment. Zinc ranged from 12.7 to 40.1 micrograms per liter, cadmium from 0.39 to 1.3, lead from 0.69 to 3.6, and copper from 1.3 to 5.5. One site, Los Cayuelos, registered the highest concentrations of all four metals, a spatial pattern the authors flag as noteworthy even though the absolute values remain low by the standards of industrialized coastlines. For context, regulatory frameworks such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s national recommended water quality criteria set thresholds designed to protect aquatic life, and the values measured across Guanahacabibes sit comfortably within ranges associated with minimal risk. In a region where the Yucatan Current and the Cuban Countercurrent sweep through the basin, exchanging water between the Caribbean and the Gulf, low dissolved metal levels also suggest that the park is not receiving significant inputs from shipping lanes or from distant continental sources, at least not at the time of sampling.

Inside the organisms, the picture was more textured. Metal concentrations in the macrophytes followed a consistent hierarchy of zinc greater than copper greater than cadmium greater than lead, mirroring the relative abundance and biological demand for these elements in seawater. The maximum tissue values were 52.5 milligrams per kilogram of zinc in Dictyota dichotoma and 5.97 milligrams per kilogram of copper in Padina pavonica. Brown algae consistently showed higher bioaccumulation factors than the seagrasses, which fits with their known physiology: macroalgae absorb dissolved metals directly across their entire thallus surface, while seagrasses regulate uptake through both roots and leaves and possess internal detoxification mechanisms that can sequester metals in vacuoles and cell walls. Crucially, the BAFs varied not just between the two groups but among individual species and among the four beaches, confirming that a single sentinel species cannot capture the full picture of metal bioavailability across a heterogeneous coastal landscape.

To untangle these overlapping patterns, the team turned to principal component analysis, a statistical technique that compresses many correlated measurements into a few underlying axes of variation. The first components explained 83.4 percent of the total variance in the dataset, a remarkably high proportion that indicates the metal chemistry at these sites is governed by a small number of dominant processes. The analysis cleanly separated two contrasting regimes: a zinc-associated pattern characterizing the beach at El Perjuicio and a copper-associated pattern at La Barca. Such distinctions matter because different metals enter coastal waters through different pathways, whether natural geological weathering of the limestone substrate, atmospheric deposition, or localized human activity, and identifying which metal dominates at which site provides clues about the underlying source, even in the absence of an obvious polluter.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding, and the one with the widest implications for how biomonitoring is done, was the relationship between dissolved metal concentrations and the bioaccumulation factors themselves. Using log-log regressions, the researchers found significant inverse relationships between dissolved metal levels and BAFs for all four metals, with statistical significance at p below 0.05. In other words, where the water carried more metal, the organisms’ concentration factors were lower. This counterintuitive pattern is a recognized feature of accumulation biology: organisms have a finite capacity to take up and regulate metals, so as dissolved concentrations rise, the ratio of tissue concentration to water concentration tends to fall, partly because of active down-regulation of transport and partly because of saturation of binding sites. The practical lesson is sobering for monitoring programs. A falling BAF does not necessarily mean a cleaner environment; it can mean the opposite. Interpreting bioaccumulation data without the corresponding dissolved measurements risks drawing exactly the wrong conclusion, which is why the integrated approach adopted here, pairing water chemistry with tissue analysis, is so valuable.

For Guanahacabibes National Park itself, the study delivers a clean bill of health and a durable reference point. The park is one of Cuba’s most important protected areas, home to coral reefs, nesting sea turtles that depend on those seagrass meadows, and a coastline that has so far escaped the intensive development seen elsewhere in the Caribbean. Establishing that its waters and macrophytes carry low metal burdens today creates the baseline that any future assessment will need. If shipping traffic increases, if upstream development expands, or if climate-driven changes in ocean chemistry alter metal mobility, as recent research on trace element biogeochemistry in warming coastal ecosystems suggests is possible, the 2026 dataset will make those shifts detectable. The work also adds to a growing global literature showing that brown algae have declined in metal content over recent decades in many regions, and it demonstrates that even a modest suite of seven macrophyte species, sampled at a handful of beaches and analyzed with careful electrochemical and spectroscopic methods, can yield a scientifically rigorous portrait of environmental quality. For tropical marine protected areas around the world, many of which lack the resources for continuous instrumental monitoring, that is a template worth copying.

Subject of Research: Trace metal distribution and bioaccumulation in seawater, brown algae, and seagrasses of a Cuban marine protected area

Article Title: Trace metal distribution in seawater, brown algae, and seagrasses from Guanahacabibes National Park, Cuba

Article References: Piña-Leyte-Vidal, J. J., Vilasó-Cadre, J. E., Reyes-Domínguez, I. A., Márquez-Llauger, L., de Jesús Barraza-García, F., Díaz-Castañón, S., Rodríguez, R., & Ricardo, J. A. (2026). Trace metal distribution in seawater, brown algae, and seagrasses from Guanahacabibes National Park, Cuba. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 198(10), Article 1103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-15961-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-15961-3

Keywords: trace metals, brown algae, seagrasses, bioaccumulation, Guanahacabibes National Park, Cuba, seawater chemistry, biomonitoring, marine pollution, Caribbean, anodic stripping voltammetry, ICP-OES