Towards women-inclusive ecology: Representation, behavior, and perception of women at an international conference.

Conferences are ideal platforms for studying gender gaps in science because they are important cultural events that reflect barriers to women in academia. Here, we explored women's participation in ecology conferences by analyzing female representation, behavior, and personal experience at the 1st Meeting of the Iberian Society of Ecology (SIBECOL). The conference had 722 attendees, 576 contributions, and 27 scientific sessions. The gender of attendees and presenters was balanced (48/52% women/men), yet only 29% of the contributions had a woman as last author. Moreover, men presented most of the keynote talks (67%) and convened most of the sessions. Our results also showed that only 32% of the questions were asked by women, yet the number of questions raised by women increased when the speaker or the convener was a woman. Finally, the post-conference survey revealed that attendees had a good experience and did not perceive the event as a threatening context for women. Yet, differences in the responses between genders suggest that women tended to have a worse experience than their male counterparts. Although our results showed clear gender biases, most of the participants of the conference failed to detect it. Overall, we highlight the challenge of increasing women's scientific leadership, visibility and interaction in scientific conferences and we suggest several recommendations for creating inclusive meetings, thereby promoting equal opportunities for all participants.

Drought alters the biogeochemistry of boreal stream networks.

Drought is a global phenomenon, with widespread implications for freshwater ecosystems. While droughts receive much attention at lower latitudes, their effects on northern river networks remain unstudied. We combine a reach-scale manipulation experiment, observations during the extreme 2018 drought, and historical monitoring data to examine the impact of drought in northern boreal streams. Increased water residence time during drought promoted reductions in aerobic metabolism and increased concentrations of reduced solutes in both stream and hyporheic water. Likewise, data during the 2018 drought revealed widespread hypoxic conditions and shifts towards anaerobic metabolism, especially in headwaters. Finally, long-term data confirmed that past summer droughts have led to similar metabolic alterations. Our results highlight the potential for drought to promote biogeochemical shifts that trigger poor water quality conditions in boreal streams. Given projected increases in hydrological extremes at northern latitudes, the consequences of drought for the health of running waters warrant attention.

Green light: gross primary production influences seasonal stream N export by controlling fine-scale N dynamics.

Monitoring nutrient concentrations at fine-scale temporal resolution contributes to a better understanding of nutrient cycling in stream ecosystems. However, the mechanisms underlying fine-scale nutrient dynamics and its implications for budget catchent fluxes are still poorly understood. To gain understanding of patterns and controls of fine-scale stream nitrogen (N) dynamics and to assess how they affect hydrological N fluxes, we explored diel variation in stream nitrate (NO3-) concentration along a headwater stream with increasing riparian area and channel width. At the downstream site, the highest day-night variations occurred in early spring, when stream NO3- concentrations were 13% higher at night than at daytime. Such day-night variations were strongly related to daily light inputs (R2 = 0.74) and gross primary production (GPP; R2 = 0.74), and they showed an excellent fit with day-night NO- variations predicted from GPP (R2 = 0.85). These results suggest that diel fluctuations in stream NO3- concentration were mainly driven by photoautotrophic N uptake. Terrestrial influences were discarded because no simultaneous diel variations in stream discharge, riparian groundwater level, or riparian solute concentration were observed. In contrast to the downstream site, no diel variations in NO3- concentration occurred at the upstream site, likely because water temperature was colder (10 degrees C vs. 12 degrees C) and light availability was lower (4 vs. 9 mol x m(-2) x d(-1)). Although daily GPP was between 10- and 100-fold lower than daily respiration, photoautotrophic N uptake contributed to a 10% reduction in spring NO3- loads at the downstream site. Our study clearly shows that the activity of photoautotrophs can substantially change over time and along the stream continuum in response to key environmental drivers such as light and temperature, and further, that its capacity to regulate diel and seasonal N fluxes can be important even in low-productivity streams.