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During the 2024 Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM24), The Oceanography Society’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee hosted a town hall on “Scientific Societies’ Roles in Building Inclusive Communities.” The town hall aimed to assess ongoing efforts to improve belonging, accessibility, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (BAJEDI) within ocean sciences, promote community building and discussions surrounding BAJEDI topics, and highlight the role of scientific societies in equity efforts. Here, we summarize the resultant communal discussions, which focused on effective models for increasing participation in ocean sciences, how to make ocean science careers more accessible, and strategies to build a more equitable community culture. Discussions highlighted several professional societies working to increase BAJEDI within the field and offered tangible action items to increase accessibility and equity at all career stages. An optional survey was distributed to OSM24 attendees to assess their lived experiences. Survey results highlighted that although knowledge of BAJEDI issues and training opportunities have increased, bullying and discrimination are still common. We recommend action items, including increased standardization and public accessibility of demographic data, to continue improving BAJEDI within ocean sciences. 

Oxygen bioavailability is declining in aquatic systems worldwide as a result of climate change and other anthropogenic stressors. For aquatic organisms, the consequences are poorly known but are likely to reflect both direct effects of declining oxygen bioavailability and interactions between oxygen and other stressors, including two—warming and acidification— that have received substantial attention in recent decades and that typically accompany oxygen changes. Drawing on the collected papers in this symposium volume (“An Oxygen Perspective on Climate Change”), we outline the causes and consequences of declining oxygen bioavailability. First, we discuss the scope of natural and predicted anthropogenic changes in aquatic oxygen levels. Although modern organisms are the result of long evolutionary histories during which they were exposed to natural oxygen regimes, anthropogenic change is now exposing them to more extreme conditions and novel combinations of low oxygen with other stressors. Second, we identify behavioral and physiological mechanisms that underlie the interactive effects of oxygen with other stressors, and we assess the range of potential organismal responses to oxygen limitation that occur across levels of biological organization and over multiple timescales. We argue that metabolism and energetics provide a powerful and unifying framework for understanding organism-oxygen interactions. Third,we conclude by outlining a set of approaches for maximizing the effectiveness of future work, including focusing on long-term experiments using biologically realistic variation in experimental factors and taking truly cross disciplinary and integrative approaches to understanding and predicting future effects.