The bibliometric half of the study is a feat of patient data work. The team searched the Scopus database for English-language articles and reviews containing the terms “cloud physics” or “cloud microphysics” published between 1970 and 2020, filtered them to Earth and planetary science journals, and winnowed the initial 8,199 candidates down to 6,987 papers. For each one, they extracted author names, affiliations, countries, and funding information, then used an automated Python script together with the genderize.io service to assign a probable binary gender to first authors and co-authors, accepting only inferences with a certainty estimate above 75 percent. The authors are candid about the limits of this approach: name-based inference cannot capture non-binary or gender-diverse identities, and the survey itself confirmed that at least three respondents identify outside the gender binary. Still, the scale of the dataset makes the broad patterns difficult to dismiss.

Those patterns are stark. Women first authors barely appear in the cloud physics literature before the mid-1990s; only after roughly 1997 does their presence as lead authors become clearly visible, and even by 2020 just about 17 percent of studies in the field were led by women. The geographic skew is even more pronounced. Seventy-seven percent of all analyzed papers were led by authors from just seven countries: Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Scientists based in the tropics, defined as those living and working between 23.5 degrees north and 23.5 degrees south, accounted for only about 5 percent of publications, with most of those coming from India, Brazil, Taiwan, Mexico, Indonesia, and Thailand. For a region that drives much of the planet’s precipitation and convection, the numbers amount to a scientific blind spot with colonial roots.

The most provocative finding concerns what the authors call parachute science. Of the 6,987 papers analyzed, only 44 were explicitly performed in the African tropics or used data from that region, and just seven of those, a mere 16 percent, included a tropics-based scientist as a co-author. In other words, when wealthy institutions send researchers to sample the atmosphere of lower-income countries, the local experts who make that work possible are frequently left off the byline. The pattern echoes a broader analysis of the Nature Index, which found that between 2015 and 2022 only 2.7 percent of articles across 82 natural science journals featured collaborations between higher-income and lower-income countries, and that in those articles richer countries contributed three authors for every one from a poorer nation. The study’s authors caution that excluding non-English papers may have shaped this conclusion, but the signal is consistent with decades of documented extractive practice.

The survey data add a human dimension to the statistics. Distributed before the 2021 virtual International Commission on Clouds and Precipitation meeting hosted from Pune, India, the 42-question instrument drew 231 responses, reduced to 198 after quality checks, covering an estimated 30 to 47 percent of the community’s active membership. Respondents skewed young, with 64 percent under 40, and 57.1 percent identified as men, 41.4 percent as women, and 1.5 percent outside the binary. Twenty-three percent of respondents identified as belonging to a historically and currently excluded group, and nearly half of those, 21 of 46, said that identity had negatively affected their careers through collaborations, promotions, publishing, funding, salary, or citations. Ten respondents reported disabilities, and six of them described feeling excluded because of it.

The numbers on harassment and hostility are difficult to read. One third of all respondents said they had experienced bullying or harassment from someone in the cloud physics community, and the burden fell unevenly: 44 percent of women reported such experiences compared with 27 percent of men, a statistically significant difference. Similarly, 37 percent of women versus 10 percent of men reported working in a hostile environment tied to their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability, a moderate statistical association. Among LGBTQIA+ respondents, the share who did not feel included in the community rose to 44 percent, compared with 30 percent overall. The authors interpret these patterns through the lens of intersectionality, the framework developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, in which overlapping marginalized identities compound the likelihood of discrimination, while noting that small subgroup sizes limit statistical confidence in some of the finer breakdowns.

Not every result is grim. When the team traced individual Scopus author IDs to measure how long researchers stayed active in the field, they found that after 1995 there was no meaningful difference between men and women in how many years they remained, judging by publication activity. Women are not dropping out faster than men, contrary to the leaky-pipeline narrative that dominates discussions of academic gender gaps. The problem, instead, is at the entrance: even in the most recent five-year cohort, between 2015 and 2020, only about a third of scientists newly entering the field were women. The authors also found that papers led by women were published in journals with impact factors statistically comparable to those led by men, whereas papers from tropics-based scientists landed in lower-impact journals on average, a gap the authors link partly to language barriers, editorial desk rejections, and pressure to publish in local, non-indexed venues.

One intriguing secondary finding suggests a practical lever for change. Papers led by women included a better balance of women co-authors than papers led by men, mirroring a recent result from ice-core science showing that women-led studies had 20 percent more women co-authors. Tropics-based first authors likewise tended to bring in other tropics-based collaborators. Whether this reflects deliberate mentorship or homophily, the implication is the same: who holds the lead-author position shapes who else gets included. Putting more women and more scientists from the Global South into senior and leading roles may be one of the most direct mechanisms for diversifying the authorship base of the field, which in turn feeds into who designs the field campaigns and whose data enter the models.

The stakes extend well beyond fairness. The tropics host extraordinary biodiversity, biomass burning, dust emissions, and the vast convective systems of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, yet input observations for climate models are often calculated rather than actually sampled there. Excluding the scientists best positioned to collect those measurements is both an ethical failure and a scientific one, degrading the very data needed to validate satellite retrievals and improve projections for the regions already being hit hardest by climate change. The authors argue that an equity-centered approach, grounded in ethical responsibility rather than a business case for diversity, is what the moment demands, a stance aligned with the International Association for Promoting Geoethics.

The paper closes with concrete recommendations: institutional diversity training that extends beyond recruitment, funded participation of Global South early-career scientists in major conferences, unconscious-bias training for reviewers, gender-balanced hiring and editorial boards, journal policies against parachute science, and funding priorities for projects conceived and led by tropics-based researchers, alongside support for networks such as the Latin America Early Career Earth System Scientist Network and the cloudsfor.africa initiative. The journal’s editor went further, writing that the findings concern all of geoscience and deserve to be read by every geoscientist. For a community whose models must describe the whole planet, the message is unambiguous: the science of clouds cannot be done well by a fraction of the world’s scientists sampling a fraction of its sky.

Subject of Research: Diversity, equity, and inclusion in the cloud physics research community

Article Title: The state of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the cloud physics community

Article References: Ladino, L. A., Ardon-Dryer, K., Pereira, D. L., Proske, U., Ramirez-Diaz, Z., Velicu, A., & Kanji, Z. A. (2026). The state of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the cloud physics community. Geoscience Communication, 9(3), 415-436. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-415-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-415-2026

Keywords: cloud physics, diversity, equity, inclusion, geosciences, parachute science, gender gap, Global South, tropics, bibliometrics, harassment, climate science

The new study, published open access in Discover Oceans, was led by Jaime-Leigh Lue Chin of the University of the West Indies with colleagues from the Natural History Museum in London, the University of British Columbia, the Institute of Marine Affairs, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The team scoured biodiversity databases such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, combed through the collections of major museums including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, searched more than 1,300 literature results, and physically examined reference collections held in Trinidad and Tobago itself. Every record had to meet strict criteria: confirmed coordinates inside the Exclusive Economic Zone, a depth of at least 200 meters, a date, and a named expedition or institution.

What emerged was a dataset of 1,342 unique biological records spanning ten animal phyla, gathered over 57 years between 1957 and 2014. Of the documented morphospecies, 315 are benthic, living on or in the seafloor, while 136 are pelagic, drifting or swimming in the water column. Chordates dominated the records with 254 morphospecies, followed by arthropods with 96. Most of what has been found so far is megafauna, the large animals visible to cameras and trawls, while the smaller macrofauna, meiofauna, and microbes that drive deep-sea ecosystem functioning remain essentially unstudied. Among the most frequently recorded species were the methane-seep mussel Gigantidas childressi, logged 101 times, and tubeworms of the genus Lamellibrachia, recorded 68 times, both foundation species that create habitat for entire communities.

The geography of discovery is strikingly uneven. Sampling has clustered east of Tobago and along the 200-meter contour of the continental slope in the southeastern waters, with the 400 to 600 meter depth band surveyed most intensively. The two densest hotspots of biological records sit alarmingly close to leased oil and gas blocks: the El Pilar methane seeps and mud volcanoes in the northeast, and the Orenoque-A site in the southeast. Below roughly 2,049 meters, an area covering about 20 percent of the entire Exclusive Economic Zone, no biological research has ever been conducted. The deep pelagic zone, which constitutes the majority of the nation’s living space, has received almost no attention, with no pelagic records at all from depths beyond 2,000 meters.

Statistical analysis makes clear how incomplete the picture remains. Using the Chao2 incidence-based estimator, the team projected a total benthic species richness of around 828 and a pelagic richness of around 772, compared with the 313 benthic and 137 pelagic species actually observed. Family-level richness was estimated at 346 against 218 recorded. The rarefaction and extrapolation curves remain far from their asymptotes, meaning that every additional expedition keeps adding new species. That pattern strongly suggests a large reservoir of undiscovered biodiversity. The most recent expedition to the area, which sampled only about 0.002 percent of the deep sea, still turned up 83 megafaunal morphospecies, at least five of which appeared to be new to science.

The geological setting helps explain why this deep sea is so unusual. Trinidad and Tobago sits on the southern edge of the Barbados Accretionary Prism, one of the largest sediment wedges on Earth, formed where the Atlantic Plate slides beneath the Caribbean Plate. The same tectonic processes that scrape up sediment also generate large oil and natural gas reserves, mud volcanoes, and methane seeps, where chemical-rich fluids carrying sulphide and methane fuel chemosynthesis-based ecosystems that thrive without sunlight. Some of the tubeworms found in these waters, such as Escarpia laminata, live for more than 300 years, meaning damage from industrial activity could take centuries to heal. Deep-sea communities generally recover far more slowly than shallow-water ones, making them especially vulnerable to physical disturbance, pollution, and sediment resuspension from drilling.

The study also exposes a stark legacy of what researchers call parachute science. Not a single one of the eleven vessels or expeditions that have sampled the nation’s deep sea originated from Trinidad and Tobago or anywhere else in the Caribbean. Five were linked to United States institutions, one to France, one to Norway, one to Canada, and two were likely commercial vessels tied to the oil and gas industry. Just three foreign-led expeditions, the R/V Dr. Fridtjof Nansen in 1988, the R/V Atlantis II in 1973, and the E/V Nautilus in 2014, account for nearly three quarters of all records. Perhaps most tellingly, an estimated less than 9 percent of the physical samples collected in the country’s waters have remained in-country. Over 89 percent are housed abroad, with 72.7 percent in the United States and 15.3 percent in the United Kingdom, including large holdings at Harvard, the Smithsonian, the University of Southampton, and the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The methodological record is equally lopsided. Trawling was the workhorse of most expeditions, with eight of the eleven using net-based gear, which explains the apparent dominance of fishes and crustaceans and the near-total absence of delicate soft-bodied animals such as cnidarians, bryozoans, ctenophores, and nemerteans. Only two expeditions deployed remotely operated or human-occupied vehicles, yet those dives recorded the greatest taxonomic diversity, capturing every phylum identified and revealing habitat-specific communities like chemosynthetic mussels and tubeworms that trawls would have shredded or missed entirely. ROV surveys averaged depths of about 1,223 meters compared with just 484 meters for benthic trawling, showing how technology determines what science can see. Image-based surveys, meanwhile, often cannot resolve species without physical specimens for morphological or molecular analysis, leaving many animals unidentified.

The authors argue that closing these gaps demands a multipronged strategy tailored to a Small Island Developing State that cannot afford its own research vessel, given that deep-sea expeditions cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars. They propose shared regional assets coordinated through the Caribbean Community, equitable international partnerships in which local scientists lead study design and interpretation, and targeted investment in education and technology transfer. They also point to an underused resource close to home: the offshore oil and gas industry, the only stakeholder currently operating at scale in the deep sea, holds high-resolution bathymetric maps, sampling platforms, and environmental data that could transform baseline knowledge if made accessible. Models such as the SERPENT Project have already shown that scientific partnerships with offshore operators can yield valuable biodiversity data.

Ultimately, the researchers frame this baseline as a foundation for stewardship rather than an endpoint. The findings support a precautionary approach, pointing to vulnerable marine ecosystems such as the El Pilar methane seeps, which remain entirely unprotected despite supporting dense aggregations of ecosystem engineers and playing roles in oceanic food webs and climate regulation. Evidence of regional connectivity, with faunal links to Grenada, the Mid-Cayman Spreading Centre, the Gulf of Mexico, and even Brazil, means that what happens in Trinidad and Tobago’s deep sea resonates across the wider Atlantic. Notable records, including the first Caribbean sighting of the tanaid Carpoapseudes heardi, the recently described tubeworm Lamellibrachia judigobini, and the lithodid crab Paralomis arethusa, hint at how much more awaits discovery. With the government actively leasing deepwater blocks and climate pressures mounting, the authors conclude that the time to invest in deep-sea knowledge, local capacity, and evidence-based ocean governance is now, before the country’s largest and least understood ecosystem is altered beyond recognition.

Subject of Research: Deep-sea biodiversity baseline assessment in Trinidad and Tobago's Exclusive Economic Zone

Article Title: A baseline assessment of deep-sea biodiversity, and guide for future actions to inform stewardship, in Trinidad and Tobago

Article References: Lue Chin, J.-L., Rabone, M., Palacios-Abrantes, J., Gobin, J., Jute, A., Kanhai, L. D. K., & Amon, D. J. (2026). A baseline assessment of deep-sea biodiversity, and guide for future actions to inform stewardship, in Trinidad and Tobago. Discover Oceans, 3(1), Article 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44289-026-00119-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44289-026-00119-3

Keywords: deep-sea biodiversity, Trinidad and Tobago, methane seeps, marine conservation, Exclusive Economic Zone, parachute science, oil and gas, Small Island Developing States, species richness estimation, Barbados Accretionary Prism, ocean stewardship, benthic ecosystems

The stakes of this gap are enormous. Marine microbes drive nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration and climate regulation, and they generate roughly half of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. The regions being neglected are not biological backwaters but critical engines of planetary biogeochemistry: the Southern Ocean, which buffers heat and carbon exchange between atmosphere and deep sea; the Benguela upwelling off southwestern Africa, where nutrient-rich waters fuel extraordinary productivity; and the Amazon River plume, where a massive pulse of terrestrial nutrients transforms the tropical Atlantic. Microbial genetic resources from such systems also hold promise for bioprospecting, offering genes of interest in fields ranging from medicine to environmental remediation. Yet the sequencing technologies needed to read this genetic treasure trove remain concentrated in a small number of high-income countries, echoing a long historical pattern in which maritime technology and economic power have been tightly linked.

Equipped with these figures, an international team of researchers led by Hugo Sarmento of the Universidade Federal de São Carlos in Brazil, together with colleagues from Argentina, South Africa, France and the AtlantECO project consortium, set out to quantify not only where ocean microbiome samples come from, but who leads the science and who receives the credit. Their conclusion is blunt: without deliberate intervention, ocean microbiome research will continue to reproduce geographic inequities inherited from centuries of northern maritime dominance. The team examined two of the southern hemisphere’s most celebrated oceanographic hotspots, the Benguela upwelling and the Amazon plume, and found that leading authorship in the published literature is dominated by institutions in northern hemisphere countries. More troubling still, more than half of the peer-reviewed articles on these regions involve no researchers affiliated with institutions in the countries bordering them at all.

This pattern has a name that has become infamous across the sciences: parachute research, sometimes called helicopter research. The term describes the practice in which scientists from wealthy nations travel to remote or biodiverse regions, collect samples or data, and publish the results without meaningful involvement of local researchers or consideration of local priorities. Studies of this practice in soil science, ecology, medicine and other fields have documented how it strips local scientists of leadership opportunities, excludes Indigenous and local knowledge that could sharpen scientific interpretation, and channels prestige and funding northward. In ocean microbiology, the consequences are concrete. Studies conducted in the Benguela upwelling region often omit researchers from Namibia, Angola or South Africa, the very nations whose coastlines frame the upwelling. Research on the Amazon plume, with direct implications for Brazilian conservation policy and debates over offshore oil drilling, frequently proceeds without Brazilian co-authors.

The article also highlights a subtler distortion of authorship norms. In Brazil, federal biodiversity law requires the involvement of Brazilian scientists as a compliance condition for obtaining permits to sample within national waters, under a mechanism called SisGen that regulates access to genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. Although the law does not explicitly mandate co-authorship, international research groups frequently add local researchers to papers primarily to satisfy permit requirements rather than out of genuine partnership. The authors argue that such token inclusion is ethically questionable: it undermines authentic collaboration, fails to build real scientific capacity, and is difficult to detect, which complicates efforts by journals and funders to police equitable practice. Adding a name to a paper, they caution, is no substitute for involving local experts in setting research questions, designing studies and interpreting results.

One structural remedy the authors advocate, adapted from the international health research community, is the adoption of reflexivity statements. Under this mechanism, authors of internationally collaborative papers must explicitly document how local researchers were engaged in setting priorities, designing the study, collecting and analyzing data, and sharing credit and benefits. Journals, funding agencies and research consortia could require such statements, making the power dynamics within collaborations transparent and accountable. The authors stress that local expertise is not a courtesy but a scientific necessity: researchers who live near a sampling site know where, how and when to sample, and their involvement often yields deeper insights and more contextualized findings. They acknowledge a real tension, however, between global-scale synthesis projects, typically led from the global north, and place-based studies, such as fisheries management or water quality monitoring, that are often more urgent priorities in low- and middle-income countries. The most successful initiatives treat these approaches as complementary rather than competing.

The AtlantECO project, funded by the European Union under the All Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance framework, offers what the authors describe as a success story in bottom-up collaboration. Within the project, part of the Tara schooner’s Mission Microbiomes cruise sailed along the Atlantic coasts of South America and Africa, targeting the tropical, equatorial and southern ocean regions. All 168 sampling stations, yielding more than 25,000 samples, were located between latitudes 65 degrees south and 15 degrees north, and ten students and postdoctoral researchers from the global south joined the expedition. Research activities were organized as topical studies in specific oceanographic regions, where local and foreign researchers met virtually before the ship’s arrival to synthesize existing knowledge and identify the questions the mission should address. In the Amazon plume study, scientists from Brazil, Europe and the United States discussed both the plume’s potential role as a carbon sink hotspot and local Brazilian concerns about offshore oil drilling; six Brazilian students participated directly in that leg. The Benguela upwelling study united South African and Namibian scientists to investigate microbial community dynamics, nutrient upwelling, carbon fluxes and the oxygen depletion events that trigger mass mortality along the coast.

South-south collaboration is emerging as an equally vital complement to north-south partnerships. The South Atlantic Ocean Sampling Day initiative, an offshoot of a northern hemisphere campaign that originally had almost no sites in the global south, has expanded standardized microbiome sampling to more than 25 locations across South America, coordinated through a hub-and-node model linking research groups in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and Chile. Participating institutions receive training and low-cost sampling kits, enabling molecular work in places where such tools were previously unavailable, while outreach events engage local schools and communities. Similarly, the Microsudaqua network now brings together more than 80 aquatic microbial ecologists from six South American countries, fostering joint publications, standardized protocols and training courses that have strengthened regional capacity and visibility. These networks, the authors argue, demonstrate that scientific integration does not require northern intermediaries and that durable, equitable research ecosystems can grow from within the south.

Yet the obstacles to scaling such successes remain formidable. Sampling permits for foreign research vessels operating in another country’s exclusive economic zone involve protracted negotiations with defense ministries and compliance with agreements such as the Nagoya Protocol. Sequencing costs are substantially higher in many low- and middle-income countries because of import taxes and limited infrastructure; notably, AtlantECO allocated ten percent of its total budget, half of its sequencing budget, to southern sequencing centers, with France’s Genoscope sharing protocols to ensure standardization. Article processing charges for open-access publishing, often reaching thousands of dollars, disproportionately exclude southern authors, and publisher waiver schemes cover only a small fraction of eligible countries. Southern representation also remains thin in major international policy frameworks, including the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the UNFCCC and the high seas Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction agreement. The authors conclude that funders, institutions, journals and governments must co-invest in southern infrastructure, require reflexivity statements, reward equitable collaboration in performance evaluations, and support conferences and networks led from the global south. The ocean, they remind readers, is a global common; its microbial stewards should reflect all of humanity.

Subject of Research: Geographic inequity in ocean microbiome research and efforts to build equitable southern hemisphere participation

Article Title: The southern gap in ocean microbiome science

Article References: Sarmento, H., Huber, P., Santos-Júnior, C. D., Abreu, A., Makhalanyane, T. P., Karenyi, N., Rocke, E., AtlantECO project partners, Acinas, S. G., Amaral-Zettler, L., Araujo, M., Arboleda-Baena, C., Bachi, G., Bănaru, D., Becker, É. C., Bellacicco, M., Benedetti, F., Bowler, C., Buongiorno Nardelli, B., … Iudicone, D. (2025). The southern gap in ocean microbiome science. Ocean Microbiology, 1(1), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44375-025-00006-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44375-025-00006-w

Keywords: ocean microbiome, southern hemisphere, parachute science, equitable collaboration, metagenomics, Benguela upwelling, Amazon plume, AtlantECO, Tara Mission Microbiomes, science diplomacy, sequencing capacity, Global South research