We also found that LGBTQ+ students with disabilities were less likely to use accommodations, less likely to disclose their disability to peers or instructors, and reported feeling less comfortable on campus as students with disabilities compared to non-LGBTQ+ students with disabilities.

Here are a couple of findings that really stood out: 🌈 Students with disabilities were 2.3× more likely to identify as LGBTQ+, with 50% of our sample identifying as LGBTQ+ 🏳️‍⚧️ They were also 30% more likely to identify as nonbinary.

Canopy thinning + burning improved recolonization for most species, but wind-dispersed species were still rare in our recovering areas. Thus, while many species will be able to recover on their own, we've identified the types of species land managers may still need to manually add to their sites.

BUT, combining frequent prescribed fire with canopy thinning (especially thinning in remnant areas) tripled establishment of ground layer species in recovering areas. This suggests that dispersal limitation is a larger constraint than establishment barriers in the passive recovery of pine savannas.

What did we find? Well, these species can recolonize on their own when recovering areas are directly adjacent to remnants, even without active interventions (!!!) if given enough time (~70 years).

That’s where we came in! We tracked the spread of 44 focal ground layer plant species from remnant pine savanna habitats into nearby recovering areas after 13 years. We also tested whether two common restoration tools, prescribed fire and canopy thinning, could speed up recolonization.

And come see my talk thursday morning about whether seed sourcing could be a tool to build resiliency into native plant restorations

I'm heading to #esa2025 and I am on the job market! Looking for academic positions at SLACs and PUI's broadly where I could share my love of restoration ecology with undergrads in the classroom and in the lab! Send me your leads, or learn more about me from my website rpizza94.github.io/RileyPizza/

Okay, I'll ACTUALLY be done with MSU once I do one last set of field surveys! follower question: What do y'all think is the best prairie grass? ((fyi there is only one correct answer))

And that's a wrap! It's been an amazing 5yrs at MSU. I've been so lucky to have had an amazing advisor in @lars-brudvig.bsky.social, a super supportive lab, and an abundance of beautiful prairies. Not goodbye, just see you later! Go green!💚🤍

My name is Riley (they/them), and I'm a tall grass prairie restoration ecologist and STEM Ed researcher! My random fact is that I currently live in Lansing michigan, and it's the furthest I've ever lived from a great lake!

Teaching at the University of Michigan's biological station for a month--so excited to be enjoying beautiful sunsets every night and doing place-based education 🥰

You want an encore? Okay! One more year of data collection on how plant communities establish when sown with different seed sources under both ambient and experimentally warmed conditions! Elevated temperature chambers went back up today, excited to see what i find! 🌱🧪

Life update

Some of the very nice ones I received ((I'm not crying you're crying))

It's graduate student appreciation week and the front office and some faculty wrote kind messages for every grad student 🥹 everything feels bad rn but this made things a bit better

IT'S HAPPENING!!! 1wk from tomorrow I'll be Dr. Pizza! DM me if you'd like to attend virtually and I can send you a link :)

I was struggling with what to write about #TransDayOfVisibility this year, but I'll say this: sorry (not sorry) to any scientists who want to distance themselves from "The trans issue" to "keep" science non-partisan because im going to *personally* become a problem for you.

Dissertation: complete! Defense in t-2wks!

Burned a prairie today!

My two favorite people became doctors yesterday!!! Congratulations to Dr. Graham and Dr. Roberts @milesroberts.bsky.social

I noticed today that my work has been cited 100 times!!! I'm so happy to know that other researchers are using my work as motivation and/or explanation for the research they do! I'm also rapidly reaching the point where I can't read all the papers i'm cited in 😭

Catch me at the Michigan state Capitol this afternoon repping my intersectional identities! Trans people do science and science is better because of it! #StandUpForScience 🌱🧪

Highlights of really cool new research coming out of ESA journals, would highly recommend checking all of these out-- especially the one about seed sourcing for restoration :) esa.org/blog/2025/03...

Winter is neat and all, but i'm ready for prairie season

And that's a wrap on my second dissertation chapter! This was the most challenging data analysis I've ever done (shoutout to @llseedsull.bsky.social and Bruce Martin for their invaluable help!). I learned a TON in this process, and can't wait to use these skills on future projects. #2down1togo

So, what do we do with all this? First, I strongly recommend more restoration research that considers site context! Without accounting for edge effects and consumer access, our experiment would’ve shown almost no impact of seed mix design. #MeasureMoreCovariates

Finally, while we rarely saw an interactive effect of increasing both species and source diversity, when we did, it was always when species identities were included. This suggests that these seed mix design decisions may have different impacts for different species!

We observed a similar pattern in source diversity: fields sown with more genotypes of each species had similar sown species amounts, except when they were in environments with consumer access during the first year (must have been something tasty in those mixes!)