Rate My Professor Maria Minor

Associate Professor Maria Minor holds an MSc from Lomonosov Moscow State University awarded in 1993 and a PhD from the State University of New York awarded in 2003. She serves as Associate Professor in Ecology and Zoology and as a doctoral supervisor in the School of Food Technology and Natural Sciences at Massey University. Her research focuses on soil ecology with an emphasis on the ecology of soil invertebrates, systems ecology examining interactions between human land use and biodiversity, and New Zealand’s Biological Heritage with attention to the diversity and conservation of native invertebrate fauna.

Minor’s work encompasses community ecology, invertebrate biology, population ecology, terrestrial ecology, and zoology. She has supervised numerous postgraduate projects on topics including prey choice and foraging behaviour of giant Powelliphanta snails, responses of soil invertebrates to pastoral management, impacts of forest fragmentation on invertebrate communities, ecology of the Bronze Beetle, reproductive behaviour in aphid parasitoids, sustainability analysis of organic fruit production systems, catchment-scale carbon emissions, effects of translocations on snail behaviour, and methods for collecting invertebrates for biodiversity assessment. She maintains an active research profile with recent publications on oribatid mite communities in alpine habitats, new species of flat mites from alpine New Zealand, landscape gradients in peatlands and mite diversity, plant invasion impacts on soil properties and invertebrates, and various aspects of soil invertebrate ecology and conservation. Minor is also an Associate Editor of the New Zealand Journal of Zoology.