The Department of Animal Sciences is pleased to welcome visiting scientist Dr. Tom Maxwell. He is currently co-teaching Sheep Production Systems while collaborating on various research and Extension projects, and we are very glad to have him with us this semester.
My area of expertise:
I am a Grazing Lands Ecologist who researches and teaches the science of pasture, grassland and rangeland management. My focus is understanding ecological mechanisms of functionally-sustainable grazing lands, for the purpose of applied management of these agricultural landscapes in meeting the economic and social needs of humanity within the threshold of the biophysical resource on which the ecosystem rests. I aim to improve the integrity of pastoral production systems for provision of nutritionally-rich products in a way that provides ecological balance between human and biological needs. I manage farmlet research units for sheep production on diverse species pastures, and long-term pasture persistence. I am involved with several postgraduate study programs investigating wide-ranging areas within grazed ecosystems, such as companion plant-soil interactions for enhanced utilisation of grassland biogeochemistry, nutritional ecology of grazing animals, genotypic studies of rangeland beef cattle and free-ranging farmed deer for improved foraging behaviour and performance, agronomy and management of fire-resistant crop and forage plants, and adapting pasture resources for livestock production in the face of more climatically extreme situations of drought and flooding.