Biography
Jordan Coscia is a graduate fellow with Smithsonian’s Virginia Working Landscapes, which promotes the conservation of native biodiversity and sustainable land use through research, education and community engagement. Coscia focuses on native plants, particularly those of the warm-season grasslands of Virginia. She assists in VWL’s grassland biodiversity surveys and is midway through a five-year native grassland restoration experiment that aims to provide data about the relative effectiveness of commonly used grassland establishment and management practices to landowners interested in restoration.
Coscia's projects include:
- The making of a meadow: an experiment in grassland restoration
- Grassland biodiversity surveys
- Identification and description of native warm-season grasslands in the Virginia Piedmont
Coscia earned her bachelor’s degrees in ecology and evolution and anthropology from the University of Pittsburg in 2019. She is currently working on her doctorate in restoration ecology at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.