CNGA 2025 Grassland Research Awards for Student Scholarship

Jannike (pronounced YON-ick-a) is fired up about conducting research and monitoring that serves the needs of land stewards and their restoration efforts, and currently focuses on coastal prairie and maritime chaparral ecosystems as a Prescribed Fire Ecology Graduate Research Assistant. She has worked on land stewardship and fire resilience issues from multiple angles, including researching the impacts of reburns on Alaska’s boreal vegetation composition, helping carry out prescribed burns in coastal Northern California, and implementing wildfire mitigation programs in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Elizabeth is a PhD candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program in Ecology at San Diego State University and the University of California, Davis. Her research applies community assembly theory to grassland ecosystems, with a focus on enhancing grassland restoration efforts. Prior to graduate school, Elizabeth worked as a botanist and research technician on California's Channel Islands, where she studied rare plant species and contributed to grassland restoration projects. Her current research aims to improve grassland restoration outcomes by investigating how species' life history and functional traits interact under varying seeding strategies and environmental conditions, including drought.

Lynn is a second year PhD student at the University of California, Merced, where she studies vernal pool and grassland plant responses to interannual weather variation, and how it affects the interacting pollinator community. She is passionate about this chapter in her PhD thesis as the vernal pool pollinator community is vastly understudied. By bringing light to this knowledge gap, she hopes it will influence and assist future conservation efforts, land management, and policy surrounding vernal pool ecosystems. She is passionate about vernal pools after discovering them in a botany class at CSU Stanislaus in 2021, where she received her Bachelor of Science in organismal ecology and evolution. Since then, highlighting these biodiversity hotspots through curation, research, and outreach has become a focal point of her life in the central California community. She is now the chair of the Vernal Pool Recovery Implementation Team with the Department of Fish and Wildlife service and is excited to continue her involvement in conserving vernal pool habitats.

Ian Cook is a second-year MS student at San José State University studying prescribed fire ecology. With a background in biology from UC Berkeley and several years of parks maintenance guiding his perspective, he hopes to work toward more proactive, ecologically informed fire management across California's Coastal Prairie. His current work combines in-situ observation with remote sensing to assess the impact of prescribed fire and other treatments on woody shrub encroachment in these landscapes. When not working, Ian is likely taking pictures of his cats.

Hello! I am a Natural Resources graduate student at Cal Poly Humboldt researching secondary plant invasions under the guidance of Dr. Justin Luong. Before pursuing my master’s degree, I attended Chico State and received a B.S. in Plant Biology. There, I was able to develop skills in both restoration and lab research. While working as a land steward at Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve, I found a passion for rehabilitating native plant communities and was later able to connect that knowledge to my lab assistant position for the GRASS-Net project. My research interests include restoration ecology, soil health, invasive species physiology, and I hope to explore more ethnobotanical topics in the future.

I am a third-year undergraduate student at UC Davis in the Biotechnology major. I am a transfer student from Santa Barbara City College, where I received an Associates of Science in Biological Sciences. I am passionate about using biological solutions to solve environmental issues. My fondest childhood memories are of being outdoors. This love of nature has stayed with me, and I hope to use my skills as a scientist to protect the environment for generations to come. Through my education, I have developed an appreciation for the influence of soil microbes on plant community resilience in the face of climate change. So, I am thrilled to be able to research the impacts of drought on microarthropod community composition in droughted California grasslands.

Logan Holey is a third-year undergraduate studying rangeland resource science at Cal Poly Humboldt. He's passionate about grassland ecology and restoration with a focus on managing invasive annual grasses. Growing up in the great plains Logan developed an affinity for grassland stewardship and an appreciation for these special ecosystems. With his research of solar microgrids on coastal prairies he aims to understand plant community establishment through plant functional traits under altered environmental conditions. Using trait-based plant selection Logan aims to inform land managers which species may establish successfully under microgrids. He hopes that further research into this topic can support the development of multiple use strategies in managing coastal grasslands for grazing management and native plant conservation.

I am a second-year PhD student in the Sexton Lab at the University of California, Merced. My research explores plant adaptation and resilience using multi-omics approaches—including genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and microbiome analysis—to uncover climate-adaptive traits in Eschscholzia californica (California poppy). This work is part of an NSF-awarded ORCC project with Dr. Jason Sexton at UC Merced and Dr. Elsa Cleland at UC San Diego. I also collaborate with the California Conservation Genomics Project and the Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where I work with Dr. Yi Zhai in the John Vogel Group. I hope that by studying our beloved state flower in California’s beautiful grasslands, I can contribute to a deeper understanding of how native plants persist under environmental change and inform conservation efforts.

I am a first-year MS student advised by Dr. Kevin Simonin in the Department of Biology at San Francisco State University. I study flower physiology in Eschscholzia californica, the California golden poppy. I aim to quantify the water cost of maintaining floral display in E. californica plants throughout an entire growing season at my field site in Mount Diablo State Park. I'd like to know if E. californica floral water-use traits demonstrate phenotypic plasticity in response to seasonal variation in temperature and precipitation. My hope is this knowledge will aid in predicting the potential range shifts and phenological alterations E. californica plants may undergo in the face of climate change