Professor Yolanda van Heezik

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?"