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Bottlenose dolphins are a key resource of the tourism industry in Fiordland and are used on a daily basis by the tour operators offering cruises on the fiords. Recent studies have shown that the current levels of dolphin???boat interactions in this region cannot be sustained by bottlenose dolphins. Interactions have both short‐ and long‐term effects on both individuals and their populations. Population models indicate that these effects may be affecting the viability of the three bottlenose dolphin populations living in Fiordland. We are currently observing drastic changes in the bottlenose dolphin population living in Doubtful Sound, which can be linked to the level of boat interactions to which they are currently exposed. The creation of a multilevel marine mammal sanctuary would help minimize dolphin???boat interactions and still allow for some further growth in the tourism sector in Fiordland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the important questions that higher education institutions ask concerning their impact on their students' sustainability-related attributes "How do our students" worldviews change as they experience higher education with us?" The process of monitoring such a dynamic entity is fraught with statistical complexity but may not be impossible for an institution willing to ask whether or not its educational efforts in "education for sustainability", "education for sustainable development" or "environmental education", and campus sustainability developments, are paralleled by changes in the attitudes of its students. We describe here a longitudinal survey process based on the revised New Ecological Paradigm scale, with two cohorts of students, in three programmes of study, operating over four years, with multiple survey inputs by each student. We implemented the longitudinal analysis using a linear mixed-effects model and describe here the development and testing of this model. We conclude that higher education institutions can benchmark the sustainability attributes of their students and monitor changes, if they are minded to. We invite higher education practitioners worldwide to join us in further developing suitable research instruments, processes and statistical models, and in further analysing the assumptions that link higher education to sustainability and to global citizenship.

This article shares and extends research-based developments at the University of Otago, New Zealand, that seek to explore how students' worldviews change as they experience higher education with us. We emphasise that sustainability attributes may be described in terms of knowledge, skills and competencies but that these are underpinned by affective attributes such as values, attitudes and dispositions; so that "education for sustainable development" is substantially a quest for affective change. We describe approaches to categorise affective outcomes and conclude that "education for sustainable development" objectives comprise higher order affective outcomes (leading to behavioural change) that are challenging for higher education to address. Our own work emphasises the need for student anonymity as these higher order outcomes are assessed, evaluated, monitored, researched or otherwise measured using research instruments that focus on worldview. A longitudinal mixed-effects repeat-measures statistical model is described that enables higher education institutions to answer the question of whether or not "education for sustainable development" objectives are being achieved. Discussion links affect to critical reasoning and addresses the possibility of documenting and assessing the development of lower and mid-order affective outcomes. We conclude that "education for sustainable development" objectives need to be clearly articulated if higher education is to be able to assess, or evaluate, their achievement.

We report the development and piloting of an evaluative instrument and process for monitoring the environmental literacy (EL) of undergraduate students in one large research-led university in New Zealand. The instrument addresses knowledge, affect and competencies in the general area of EL in line with this institution's adoption of EL as a graduate attribute (or in a US context, a general-education learning outcome, and something to be fostered throughout a student's education). The instrument and associated processes were designed to fit within conventional institutional mechanisms that manage student feedback on the quality of teaching. The instrument was tested with more than 600 students from more than eight programmes over the course of a year and its use stressed that students were anonymous within the survey. We conclude that evaluating (or in a US context, assessing) the extent to which students acquire EL is an achievable objective and is a reasonable expectation for any higher education institution that claims to foster this attribute.

A small population of approximately 68 bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus, resident in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand, is subject to physiologically challenging conditions, and is exposed to anthropogenic pressure from tourism.A voluntary Code of Management incorporating dolphin protection zones (DPZs), in which tour boat access is limited, was established in 2008.Kernel density estimation (KDE) was used to quantify dolphin habitat use over a 13‐year period in order to describe seasonal variation in habitat use and consistency of habitat use over a decadal period, and to provide quantitative estimates of the extent of overlap between DPZs and core areas (50% volume contour) of habitat use.Habitat use varied seasonally, with the inner fjord area used more frequently in warmer months, and with a shift in use to the outer fjord in colder months. Patterns in habitat use were highly consistent over the 13‐year duration of the study.The spatial overlap between the area of core dolphin habitat and DPZs was low (<18%) overall, and some DPZs were rarely used during colder periods.Consistency in habitat use through time vindicates spatial management, but low overlap between core habitat and current DPZs suggests that an expansion of the DPZ areas would confer greater protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education is increasingly interested in its impact on the sustainability attributes of its students, so we wanted to explore how our students’ environmental concern changed during their higher education experiences. We used the Revised New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP) with 505 students and developed and tested a multinomial regression model to help us to understand what can be measured and how to interpret changes. Our results demonstrate that even small differences, not apparent when only mean NEP scores are reported for cohorts of students, can be modeled to reveal statistically significant trends. We advise further exploration of this instrument and its applicability to higher education's quest for sustainability-credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]