⚠️ New paper out in Nature Ecology & Evolution 🌱 #Grasslands #SoilCarbon @natecoevo.nature.com

Excited to see continued coverage of our recent article on how American kestrels can improve food safety and reduce crop damage on cherry farms: insideclimatenews.org/news/2201202...

So excited about this incredible fellowship program designed to empower students interested in tackling issues like climate change, wildfires, and more. Open to all majors, because all perspectives and skillsets are important to engage with these challenges!

Opinion | Gaming the System? Extended Time on Tests Is Often a Waste of Time Extra time on a well-designed college exam rarely benefits anyone. https://bit.ly/49RKoHP #EDUSky #HigherEd #AcademicSky

Extra time on exams has become the default accommodation in higher ed—but evidence suggests it often doesn’t help anyone: not students “gaming the system,” and more concerningly, often not students with disabilities either. Read our opinion piece here: url-shortener.me/8R70

Submitted my very first DBER research paper today!!! So excited for y'all to see the final product (these may be my prettiest figures yet!)

I'm excited to share memes that my students made this year in my undergraduate #Evolution class #popgen #consgen #evolbiol . "When a batesian mimicry species comes to the party: hello fellow harmful species" "I found on all-encompassing way to define species"

Take-home lesson we ALL need to learn: Resistance works and capitulation doesn't!

"No one should be made to feel inferior or that they do not belong in science because of their origins." #ScienceWorkingLife https://scim.ag/48JF6Pg

It’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities and I am currently on a hellish and agonising journey across London to get home. So much of the world is exclusionary & harmful for so many of us. If *you* can create communities, spaces, interactions which can reduce that harm, please do ❤️

PRI is seeking a postdoctoral researcher with strong computational and data science skills to join a project focused on identifying causal environmental drivers of crop resilience and yield. 🧬 Learn more and apply: careers.msu.edu/jobs/researc... #PlantSciJobs #PlantScience

What is actually more concerning as someone who does research in this field is that NOBODY is talking about the effectiveness of extra testing time for students with disabilities (not here to argue over whether students are *actually* disabled because TBH doesn't really matter to me)

when we say we want more streets to be pedestrianized, this is what we mean

Our timely study set in western India, which utilizes #indigenous traditional literature dating back to 750yrs, provides 1 such line of evidence. Contradicting t popular notion of a forested-past, historical nature descriptions revealed a major% of plants typical of savannas. 5/n

🌟New Pub🌟! Out in @peopleandnature.bsky.social Ecology meets Mythology: Medieval stories and songs uncover India’s ecological past. Link to paper: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... (click "MR" for Marathi abstract). @dhmsu.bsky.social @msunatsci.bsky.social 1/n

Have you seen the ecosystems here? Have you noticed the plants and wildlife and the microbial communities that call Earth home? The intricate and complicated web of life that has been knitted over billions of years, evolved for these specific planetary conditions? I wouldn't leave that for anything

White House hits road block in effort to get top colleges to sign deal as 6 of 9 reject the compact by today's deadline

notice the general mood of the timeline? how everyone is in a good mood and there’s a lot less misery and dooming? how there’s a lot of “we’re going to beat these assholes”? anyway that’s why these events are important

Check out our new preprint on monkeyflower salt spray adaptation, with coauthors @pcdurant.bsky.social, Katherine Egeler, and @davidlowry.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Never accuse someone of being lazy when you've observed their mistakes and not their effort. That’s not constructive. It’s unkind, ableist, and biased. Signed, an author with ADHD whose three typo-eque errors got a whole manuscript deemed “careless.”

I am hiring a postdoc to examine the genomic and evolutionary basis of plant microbiome variation in legumes. There are opportunities to gain teaching experience. Chicago is a great city to live in! Please help spread the word. share.google/gukbzS1zdIx6...

Seed vernalization and gibberellic acid interact to affect life cycle type in facultative winter annual Canadian horseweed (Erigeron canadensis) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.06.680458v1

Holy shit, this is a huge deal

Grad school is HARD. Feels like everyone else has it together—but newsflash: everyone struggles, even your PI! These faculty interviews discussing their grad school struggles made me feel less alone. Share these with your cohort and be nicer to yourself 🧪🌿🎓 risecenter.asu.edu/fail-safe

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

We know diversity = more ideas, novelty, advancement and desirable outcomes but how do we recruit and retain diversity? In our paper, me and other LGBTQ+ restoration ecologists outline issues and solutions to retaining and supporting queer ecologists onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Almost 6 years ago I submitted my first manuscript--it took me about a year and a half to go from cleaned data to finished draft. Today, I finished a manuscript draft in a new-to-me system in under 4 months. Progress is wild y'all--motivation for anyone struggling to write for the first time🧪🌱

Emotion cemented Jepsen as a niche star and was acclaimed for its sense of drama and unabashed schmaltz. It's also a trove of songs about one particular emotion less associated with her cutesy image.

Happening in 20 minutes! #ESA2025

I'm giving a talk on Monday at #ESA2025, in the OOS about #phenology "Beyond Budburst" (3:30-5:00pm), organized by Luke McCormack & Christy Rollinson. There's a great list of speakers. I'm presenting at 4:30pm. Room: Hilton Key 8 🚨 NOTE: Individual talk times within the session were updated today!

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/

Update, i got moved to Thursday afternoon 😭 come see me anyway though!

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!💚🤍

Not me getting the optimal time to present at ESA this year (First day in the afternoon)!!!

Hey, Miles' @milesroberts.bsky.social beautiful paper showing that sequence diversity missed by standard methods contributes to Lewontin's paradox is officially published in @evolletters.bsky.social. academic.oup.com/evlett/advan...

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!

Though our recent #NSF grant was terminated, the @datanuggets.bsky.social program still continues through support from the @kbslter.bsky.social and other sources! We're searching for future funding opportunities and will continue to help share authentic datasets and science stories with students!

It's also a misunderstanding of what the grants are for. It's not a billion dollar donation, Harvard won the grants to do specific research that it is in a relatively unique position to do. Trade schools aren't going to be able to take over, eg, Harvard's cancer immunotherapy research.

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 🥰

Lots of gloom this week but I'm so excited to be celebrating new Drs Pizza & Roberts with @lars-brudvig.bsky.social @rileypizza.bsky.social @milesroberts.bsky.social

NYT: One estimate finds that DOGE’s “firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers” will actually COST taxpayers “upward of $135 billion this fiscal year.” @nytimes.com 🤡 www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/u...

🚨 MS POSITION 🚨  🌎🧪🌾🌿🌱🍁🪴🐄 #GenerationRestoration The Martyn Lab seeks applications to the Rangeland Science Master’s program @ Oregon State University to explore drivers of rangeland restoration the PNW & Great Basin. Tuition & stipend included. 🧵

🚨 POST DOC 🚨 The Suding Lab at the University of CO - Boulder is recruiting a Postdoc researcher to build on an ongoing project examining grassland fuels, wildfire risk, & management questions. Applications close May 8, 2025. Start date will be before September 2025. 🌎🌾🧪🌱🌿🍁💻🔥📈

Congratulations to @davidlowry.bsky.social lab postdoc @lestanley.bsky.social, this year’s MSU Danny Schnell Plant Biology Outstanding Postdoctoral Award recipient! 🎉 Lauren has made exceptional contributions to MSU through research, mentorship, and outreach, and PRI is very proud of her!

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

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