Tropical and temperate ecology: How historical geopolitical relations have influenced the structure of knowledge

• We compare tropical and temperate ecology through a scientometric analysis of approximately 500,000 articles. • The pattern of collaborations and authorship reveals the consequences of historical geopolitical relations. • The BRICS countries play a prominent role in tropical and global ecological research in the 21st century. • Temperate and tropical ecology have different conceptual structures. • We demonstrated the existence of a temperate bias in ecology. In ecology, the reproduction of structural biases has been evidenced, but their relationship to the structure of knowledge has not been fully analysed. One example is the discussion of the existence of a temperate bias that shapes our understanding of the tropics. Here we conduct a comparative scientometric analysis of tropical and temperate ecology in different time periods (based on approximately half a million peer-reviewed articles) to understand how ecological knowledge has been shaped by socio-economic and geopolitical influences. We demonstrate a dramatic effect of globalisation on the scientific production of ecology, expressed in a higher frequency of multinational articles and a more connected network of international collaborations. The structure of citations and authorship points to an under-representation of the Global South, although the BRICS countries are prominent in the 21st century. The conceptual structure indicates a common pool of concepts, but marked differences in the epistemic focus between tropical ecology (focus on applied ecology) and temperate ecology (focus on ecosystem ecology). We also observed a high frequency of geographic locations as key concepts in the tropics, which we interpret in light of the geopolitics of knowledge. In conclusion, although we observe that knowledge from the Global South is an integral part of ecology in different periods, we confirm that North-South inequality is transferred to the temperate-tropical relationship, confirming the existence of a temperate bias.