Rate My Professor Yolanda van Heezik

Professor Yolanda van Heezik holds the position of Professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago. She completed her PhD at the University of Otago in 1988, with a thesis titled 'The growth and diet of the yellow-eyed penguin, Megadyptes antipodes'. Her research specializations encompass urban biodiversity, the impacts of cats and other predators on urban wildlife, viability and distributions of urban wildlife populations, human dimensions of urban biodiversity, and breeding ecology of seabirds. Current projects under her supervision include investigations into children's connections 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, lifetime reproductive success in yellow-eyed penguins, diet of little penguins using stable isotopes, and resource selection by Peripatus across the urban landscape.

Professor van Heezik teaches courses including MARI 302 Biology and Behaviour of Marine Vertebrates, ZOOL 417 Harvest Management, WILM 402 Techniques of Wildlife Management, WILM 403 Practice of Wildlife Management, and ZOOL 319 Conservation Biology. She supervises a range of current and recent postgraduate students on topics such as seasonal resource use by birds in urban forests, instrumentation effects on detecting cat hunting behaviour, children's access to biodiverse areas, impacts of visitor disturbance on little penguins, conservation of captive Otago skinks, spatial ecology of urban possums, specimen trees as keystone structures, resource selection by urban invertebrates, lifetime reproductive success in yellow-eyed penguins, little penguin diet composition, physical influences on fairy prion breeding, and marine stochasticity impacts on yellow-eyed penguins. Key publications include 'Do domestic cats impose an unsustainable harvest on urban bird populations?' (van Heezik et al., 2010), '"My garden is an expression of me": Exploring householders\' relationships with their gardens' (Freeman et al., 2012), 'Nature–based interventions for improving health and wellbeing: The purpose, the people and the outcomes' (Shanahan et al., 2019), 'Sowing the seeds of wildlife-friendly gardening: Does a garden biodiversity assessment promote uptake of pro-biodiversity gardening behaviours?' (van Heezik et al., 2026), and 'Invertebrate richness and diversity in parks situated along a gradient of urbanisation' (McNaughton et al., 2025).