Research Profile
Victoria Goodall’s research has mainly focused on the emerging field of statistical ecology – the application of various statistical methods to ecological data. Her Masters thesis entitled “Statistical Analyses of Artificial Waterpoints: their effect on the herbaceous and woody structure composition within the Kruger National Park” utilised three different datasets from the Kruger Park and applied various analyses to answer specific research questions. Her PhD thesis is entitled “Statistical Approaches towards Analysing Ungulate Movement Patterns in the Kruger National Park”. She fitted Independent Mixture, Hidden Markov and Bayesian State-space models to GPS location data obtained from sable antelope (Hippotragus niger), buffalo (Syncerus caffer) and zebra (Equus quagga) in the Kruger National Park. She has also been involved in a variety of research projects including a climate analysis of long-term weather records from South Africa’s National Parks; distribution of tree sizes in the Venetia-Limpopo Nature Reserve; assessment and management of the invasive shrub in South Africa, remote sensing and others.
She has been a referee of articles for the following peer-reviewed journals: International Journal of Climatology (2016), Journal of Applied Statistics (2015), South African Statistical Journal (2015), South African Statistical Association Conference Proceedings (2014 and 2017). She has been an external examiner of a Masters thesis for the University of Cape Town (2016).
Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications
Du Plessis, S.P., Rink A., Goodall, V., Kaplan, H., Jubase, N., van Wyk, E. (2018)
Assessment and management of the invasive shrub, Cistus ladanifer, in South Africa. South African Journal of Botany 117: 85-94.
Goodall, VL, Fatti, LP, Owen-Smith, N (2017)
Animal Movement Modelling: Independent or Dependent Models? South African Statistical Journal 51, 295 - 315.
Hofmeyr, JH, Goodall, VL, Bongers, M, Holtzman, P (2007)
A new measure of brand attitudinal equity based on the Zipf distribution. International Journal of Market Research 50, 181-202.
Langrock, R, Hopcraft, JGC, Blackwell, PG, Goodall, VL, King, R, Niu, M, Patterson, TA, Pedersen, MW, Skarin, A, Schick, RS (2014)
Modelling group dynamic animal movement. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5, 190-199.
O'Connor, TG, Goodall, VL (2017)
Population size structure of trees in a semi-arid African savanna: Species differ in vulnerability to a changing environment and reintroduction of elephants. Austral Ecology 42, 664-676.
Owen-Smith, N, Goodall, V (2014)
Coping with savanna seasonality: comparative daily activity patterns of African ungulates as revealed by GPS telemetry. Journal of Zoology 293, 181-191.
Owen-Smith, N, Goodall, VL, Fatti, LP (2012)
Applying mixture models to derive activity states of large herbivores from movement rates obtained using GPS telemetry. Wildlife Research 39, 452-462.
Ritchie, M., Debba, P., Lück-Vogel, M., Goodall, V. (2018)
Assessment of Accuracy: Systematic Reduction of Training Points for Maximum Likelihood Classification and Mixture Discriminant Analysis (Gaussian and t-distribution). South African Journal of Geomatics 7(2), 132-146.
Van Wilgen, N, Goodall, V, Holness, S, Chown, SL, McGeoch, MA (2016)
Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns in South Africa's national parks. International Journal of Climatology 36, 706-721.
Research Grants
Victoria Goodall has been a recipient of the following research grants from the National Research Foundation:
Thuthuka (2015 – 2017), Travel Grant for individuals Knowledge Interchange and Collaboration (2016) and Knowledge Fields Development (2012).
