Racial and ethnic discrimination persist in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, including ecology, evolution and conservation biology (EECB) and related disciplines. Marginalization and oppression as a result of institutional and structural racism continue to create barriers to inclusion for Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour (BIPOC), and remnants of historic racist policies and pseudoscientific theories continue to plague these fields. Many academic EECB departments seek concrete ways to improve the climate and implement anti-racist policies in their teaching, training and research activities. We present a toolkit of evidence-based interventions for academic EECB departments to foster anti-racism in three areas: in the classroom; within research laboratories; and department wide. To spark restorative discussion and action in these areas, we summarize EECB's racist and ethnocentric histories, as well as current systemic problems that marginalize non-white groups. Finally, we present ways that EECB departments can collectively address shortcomings in equity and inclusion by implementing anti-racism, and provide a positive model for other departments and disciplines.

Invasive species could benefit from being introduced to locations with more favorable species interactions, including the loss of enemies, the gain of mutualists, or the simplification of complex interaction networks. Microbiomes are an important source of species interactions with strong fitness effects on multicellular organisms, and these interactions are known to vary across regions. The highly invasive plant yellow starthistle (Centaurea solstitialis) has been shown to experience more favorable microbial interactions in its invasions of the Americas, but the microbiome that must contribute to this variation in interactions is unknown. We sequenced amplicons of 16S rRNA genes to characterize bacterial community compositions in the phyllosphere, ectorhizosphere, and endorhizosphere of yellow starthistle plants from seven invading populations in California, USA, and eight native populations in Europe. We tested for the differentiation of microbiomes by geography, plant compartment, and plant genotype. Bacterial communities differed significantly between native and invading plants within plant compartments, with consistently lower diversity in the microbiome of invading plants. The diversity of bacteria in roots was positively correlated with plant genotype diversity within both ranges, but this relationship did not explain microbiome differences between ranges. Our results reveal that these invading plants are experiencing either a simplified microbial environment or simplified microbial interactions as a result of the dominance of a few taxa within their microbiome. Our findings highlight several alternative hypotheses for the sources of variation that we observe in invader microbiomes and the potential for altered bacterial interactions to facilitate invasion success.IMPORTANCEPrevious studies have found that introduced plants commonly experience more favorable microbial interactions in their non-native range, suggesting that changes to the microbiome could be an important contributor to invasion success. Little is known about microbiome variation across native and invading populations, however, and the potential sources of more favorable interactions are undescribed. Here, we report one of the first microbiome comparisons of plants from multiple native and invading populations, in the noxious weed yellow starthistle. We identify clear differences in composition and diversity of microbiome bacteria. Our findings raise new questions about the sources of these differences, and we outline the next generation of research that will be required to connect microbiome variation to its potential role in plant invasions.