Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program:
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Tom is a postdoctoral researcher in the Wyoming Coop Fish and Wildlife Research Unit.. Tom is a postdoctoral researcher with general interests in demography, plant-herbivore interactions and the population consequences of wildlfie migration. He currently works with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission to understand bighorn sheep movements and demography. Between 2012 and 2014 he studied savannah tree dynamics in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania with Michael Anderson of Wake Forest University. Tom worked with Matt Kauffman previously from 2010-2012 modeling ungulate population monitoring data, in collaboration with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Tom's Ph.D. dissertation, under Doug Bolger in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program at Dartmouth College, examined patterns of spatial demography and site fidelity in a declining population of wildebeest in Northern Tanzania (the Tarangire Ecosystem, Tanzania). This project used a non-invasive photographic identification software program (Wild-ID) developed at Dartmouth to individually identify wildebeest by their shoulder stripe patterns. In 2009, with support from WCS-Tarangire Elephant Project, he initiated a wildebeest GPS collaring effort to help characterize fine-scale movement patterns and larger-scale migratory pathways within the Tarangire Ecosystem. Prior to his PhD research, he spent a year studying elephant behavior and genetics in Amboseli National Park, Kenya as a field assistant for Beth Archie and S...