Sam Ahler

My name is Sam Ahler (they/them) and I was born in what is now Wisconsin—the traditional territories of the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Potawatomi, Dakota, and Ojibwe Nations. I am of English and German descent and my family immigrated to North America in the 1720s. I have Bachelor’s Degrees from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in Conservation Biology and Environmental Studies, with a minor in LGBTQ+ Studies. I worked in oak savannas and tallgrass prairies with Dr. Ellen Damschen.

As a PhD student in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Colorado – Boulder, I work with Katharine Suding and Nancy Shackelford in the mixed grass prairies along the Front Range of Colorado. I now live and work in the traditional territories of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pueblo and Shoshone Nations. In collaboration with the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield Farms, I study the impact of small-scale environmental conditions on grass establishment, growth, and survival. In addition, I study vegetative—or clonal—methods of reproduction in grasses to better understand individual and population persistence and the mechanisms linking population-level dynamics to ecosystem-level processes. Finally, in collaboration with the REACH Lab at CU Boulder, I study the experiences of LGBTQ+ students in field based undergraduate courses.