Gender representation on environmental sciences editorial boards.

Gender representation in science has been extensively investigated by scientists from different disciplines and locations. Men continue to publish, collaborate, and obtain more citations than women. We investigated the relationship between Editor-in-Chief (EiC) and Editorial Boards' (EB) gender representation and the impact factor (IF) of environmental science journals (ESJ). We analyzed EiC/EB members of the top ESJ in the Web of Science databases that published at least 10,000 articles from their first publication until 2021. Binary gender information was assigned to 9153 members from 39 journals. IF ranged from 0.854 to 11.236 (x̅=5.05). Women represented 20 % of EiC positions and 23 % of EB members. Although, the majority of female EiC/EBs were represented in journals with an IF lower than the mean. No correlation was found between EiC's gender representation and the IF (p > 0.05). Regarding the hypothesis that female EiC was associated with EB gender equity, the link was not significant (p = 0.3). Our hypothesis of no association between gender proportion and IF was accepted for journals with IF>5 (p = 0.2) but rejected for IF.

Methanogenic communities and methane emissions from enrichments of Brazilian Amazonia soils under land-use change.

Amazonian forest conversion into agricultural and livestock areas is considered one of the activities that contribute most to the emission of greenhouse gases, including methane. Biogenic methane production is mainly performed by methanogenic Archaea, which underscores the importance of understanding the drivers shaping microbial communities involved in the methane cycling and changes in methane metabolism. Here, we aimed to investigate the composition and structure of bacterial and archaeal communities in tropical soils in response to land-use changes, emphasizing the methanogenic communities. We collected soil samples from primary forest, pasture, and secondary forest of the Amazonian region and used a strategy based on the enrichment of the methanogenic community with three different methanogenic substrates followed by measurements of methane emission, quantification of mcrA gene copies by qPCR, and total 16 S rRNA gene sequencing (metataxonomics). We observed variations in the structure of bacterial and archaeal communities of soils under different uses. The richness of methanogenic communities was higher in pasture than forest soils and this richness remained during the incubation period, and as a consequence, the enrichment induced earlier methane emission in pastures-derived samples. Furthermore, pastures enrichments exhibited methanogenic archaea networks more complex than primary and secondary forests. In conclusion, pastures harbor a richer and more responsive methanogenic community than forest samples, suggesting that conversion of forest areas to pasture may boost methane emission.