Rate My Professor Ursula Ellenberg

Dr. Ursula Ellenberg serves as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Marine Science at the University of Otago. She earned her MSc from the University of Kiel and her PhD from the University of Otago in 2010, with her doctoral thesis titled 'Assessing the impact of human disturbance on penguins,' supervised by Philip Seddon and Lloyd Davis. With more than 20 years of experience coordinating fieldwork and leading research projects in New Zealand, Australia, Chile, Canada, Germany, the Russian Arctic, and the Norwegian Arctic, Ellenberg is an ecologist specializing in both terrestrial and marine systems. She employs novel technologies to study how animals utilize their environments and respond to stressors, informing anticipatory conservation management. Previously, she held a lecturer position at La Trobe University in the Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution. Ellenberg is a founding member of the Tawaki Trust and, together with Thomas Mattern, leads the Tawaki Project, a long-term investigation into the biology and marine ecology of Fiordland penguins (tawaki, Eudyptes pachyrhynchus) and other crested penguins across their breeding range.

Ellenberg's research interests include conservation physiology to predict organism responses to environmental stressors; behavioural ecology exploring individual differences in stress-coping styles, foraging strategies, reproductive success, and survival; marine ecology and at-sea behaviour of seabirds; population ecology and conservation biology of seabirds; and citizen science. She teaches courses such as MARI 112 Marine Biology: The Living Ocean, MARI 302 Biology and Behaviour of Marine Vertebrates, MARI 429 Coastal Marine Environment, and ECOL 111 Ecology and Conservation of Diversity. She currently supervises postgraduate students on topics including the foraging ecology of tawaki in Dusky Sound, thermoregulation in little penguins, dive physiology of Fiordland penguins, yellow-eyed penguin foraging on Stewart Island, and GPS tracking of Whenua Hou diving petrels. Key publications encompass 'Vulnerability of marine megafauna to global at-sea anthropogenic threats' (Conservation Biology, 2025), 'Population structure of three New Zealand crested penguins identifies current conservation challenges for the Fiordland penguin/tawaki' (PLoS ONE, 2025), 'A Jack of all trades: Tawaki/Fiordland penguins are able to utilise diverse marine habitats during winter migration' (PeerJ, 2025), 'Inter-colony and inter-annual behavioural plasticity in the foraging strategies of a fjord-dwelling penguin' (PeerJ, 2025), 'High definition video loggers provide new insights into behaviour, physiology, and the oceanic habitat of a marine predator, the yellow-eyed penguin' (2018), and 'Heart rate responses provide an objective evaluation of human disturbance stimulus in a wild seabird' (Conservation Physiology, 2013). Her contributions advance understanding of human-wildlife interactions and seabird conservation.