Dr. Tom Nudds

Tom Nudds obtained B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Windsor, where he investigated habitat use and foraging in white-tailed deer. In 1980 he obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario for his research on competition and community structure in prairie waterfowl. After a postdoctoral appointment as an NSERC/DOE Visiting Fellow in Government Laboratories at the Canadian Wildlife Service's Prairie Migratory Bird Research Centre in Saskatoon, he became Assistant Professor at Guelph. He teaches ecology and resource conservation. Now Associate Professor, he has been a Visiting Scientist at the Department of Animal Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and an Associate Editor of The Journal of Wildlife Management
Research conducted in Dr. Nudds laboratory encompasses three broad areas: community ecology, behavioural ecology and conservation biology. The principal focus of community ecology continues to be comparative and experimental studies of the relationships among ecology, morphology and species diversity of duck assemblages in prairie and boreal wetlands. A secondary interest in this regard is how parasites might affect the outcome of ecological interactions among host species. The principal system under study here is that of moose-deer-brainworm.
Research about behavioural ecology has focussed primarily on factors that influence group formation, with special attention to pre-hatch (nest parasitism, egg dumping) and post-hatch (creching, adoption) brood amalgamation. Resident Canada geese provide the experimental system for these studies.
Finally, Nudds studies the distribution and diversity of mammals and forest songbirds in real and functional ecological islands and analyze how landscape configuration influences the diversity of vertebrates in and around nature reserves. This program links large scale, long term data about climate, land use and species' distribution and abundance.