Associate Professor
Andrea Griffin

Andrea is a Wildlife Conservation Scientist and Behavioural Ecologist. Her core interests lie in using interdisciplinary research approaches to understanding how animals cope with environmental change over the short (within their lifetimes) and long-(evolutionary) term.

She pioneered the use of conditioning to train captive-bred, predator-naive animals to recognise predators, and proved for the first time that marsupials can learn socially from watching each other. She has explored the role of cognition and competition in the range expansion of the highly successful introduced common (Indian) myna bird across the east coast of Australia, demonstrating that cognition is likely most important. She has led research demonstrating that invasive mynas learn to recognise the humans who trap them and the places where they see conspecifics trapped, research that underpins her recommendation to not approach traps during the daytime. Her human psychological research has demonstrated that what people know about wildlife loss rather than the emotions they feel better predicts their engagement in behaviours that benefit the environment.

 

She now leads a large collaborative research program using motus automated telemetry, stable isotopes, ecotoxicological assays, and eDNA to study the foraging and movement ecology of shorebirds and the predators that threaten them. She also leads an interdisciplinary research team of ecologists, electronic engineers, and computer scientists developing a national acoustic monitoring AI system for Australia.

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Andrea and her students and collaborators have authored over 100 journal articles and presented at over 100 national and international conferences. She has delivered > 40 national and international guest lectures. This body of work has been cited over 5300 times and she has an h-index of 35, and a i10-index of 62.