N. Thompson Hobbs

Professor and Head, Department of Forest, Rangeland and Watershed Stewardship

Colorado State University

Dr. Thompson Hobbs studies population dynamics and nutritional ecology of wildlife. After receiving his Ph.D. from Colorado State University in 1979, he worked for 23 years as a Life Scientist for the Colorado Division of Wildlife. He held a joint appoint as a Research Scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL), Colorado State University during 1995-2001 and was a Senior Research Scientist NREL from 2001 until 2005, when he was appointed department head and professor in the Forest, Rangland and Stewardship department in CSU's Warner College of Natural Resources.

Dr. Hobbs' research has been widely recognized; he won the Society for Conservation Biology Distinguished Service Award in 1999 and the Wildlife Society Award for the Outstanding Article in Wildlife Ecology and Management in 1985 and 1992. His work on characteristics of plants that determine eating rate of mammalian herbivores provides the foundation for contemporary thinking on how herbivores respond to changes in the abundance, structure, and spatial distribution of vegetation. He has made many contributions to understanding relationships between wildlife populations and their habitats, contributions that have been widely applied in managing national parks and conservation reserves. His current work includes projects on the dynamics of mule deer populations infected with chronic wasting diseases, impacts of habitat fragmentation on the ecology and economies of arid land grazing systems worldwide, and implications of heterogeneity in plants for regulating herbivore populations. He teaches a course in Systems Ecology, which introduces graduate students to modern techniques for building and evaluating ecological models.