Email yolanda.vanheezik@otago.ac.nz
Phone +64 3 479 4107
Teaching
- MARI 302 Biology and Behaviour of Marine Vertebrates
- ZOOL 417 Harvest Management
- WILM 402 Techniques of Wildlife Management
- WILM 403 Practice of Wildlife Management
- ZOOL 319: Conservation Biology
Research Interests
- Urban biodiversity
- Impacts of cats and other predators on urban wildlife
- Viability/distributions of urban wildlife populations
- Human dimensions of urban biodiversity
- Breeding ecology of seabirds
Current Projects
- Children's connection with nature in urban areas
- Vegetative and invertebrate diversity in private gardens
- Householder knowledge and attitudes towards biodiversity in their own gardens
- Hunting behaviour of domestic cats
- Resource use by native and exotic birds in urban forest fragments
- Fine-scale classification of biodiversity values of urban spaces
- Movements and habitat use of urban possums using GPS technology
- Tourism impacts on little penguins
- Life-time reproductive success in yellow-eyed penguins
- Diet of little penguins using stable isotopes
- Resource selection by Peripatus across the urban landscape
Current and Recent Postgraduate Students
- Emily Gray, "Seasonal resource use by native and exotic birds in mixed native/exotic urban forest fragments"
- Cayley Coughlin, "Instrumentation effects and the use of tri-axial accelerometers to detect hunting behaviour in domestic cats".
- Kate Hand, "Children's independent use of space in their neighbourhoods: do children access bio-diverse areas in proportion to their availability?"
- Sara Larcombe, "Impacts of visitor disturbance on breeding little penguin".
- Sam Haultain, "Maximising the conservation potential of the captive Otago skink (Oligosoma otagense) population".
- Amy Adams, "Spatial ecology and genetic population structure of the common brushtail possum within a NZ urban environment"
- Ed Waite, "Specimen trees as ecological keystone structures in the urban landscape".
- Dan Barrett, "Multiple-scale resource selection of an undescribed urban invertebrate (Onychophora: Peripatopsidae) in Dunedin, New Zealand".
- Aviva Stein, "Lifetime reproductive success in yellow-eyed penguins: influence of life-history parameters and investigator disturbance"
- Scott Flemming, "Little penguin diet composition at three colonies: can stable isotope analysis be used to detect dietary trends?"
- Kat Manno, "Physical environmental influences on breeding performance of the fairy prion"..
- Mel Young, "Marine-based stochasticity and the impact upon Yellow-eyed penguins on mainland New Zealand; does it drive annual regional productivity?"