Associate Professor
Andrea Griffin

Andrea is a Behavioural Ecologist and Wildlife Conservation Scientist. Her core interests lie in using interdisciplinary research approaches to understanding how animals cope with environmental change within their lifetimes. She began her career by pioneering the use of conditioning to train captive-bred, predator-naive animals to recognise predators, proving for the first time that marsupials can learn about predators from watching each others’ fear responses. As an Australian Research Council Post-doctoral Fellow, she built a research program exploring the role of cognition, behavioural flexibility, and competition in the range expansion of the highly successful introduced common (Indian) myna bird across the east coast of Australia. She and her collaborators and students demonstrated that behavioural flexibility is central to the success of introduced birds in urban habitats, but the quality of an urban diet reduces the quality of sexual signals. Most remarkably, the common myna learns to recognise the humans who trap them and the places where they see conspecifics trapped, and are becoming more wary in areas of Australia where they are heavily trapped. Her recent work in conservation psychology has shown that what people know about wildlife loss rather than the emotions they feel better predicts their engagement in behaviours that benefit the environment, and that empathy is a poor basis for decision making in wildlife management.

 

The wildlife learning principles revealed by her work are having real-world impact, from training threatened captive-bred animals to respond to predators to designing drones to protect vineyards from pest bird predation and improving trapping methodologies for invasive birds.

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Andrea has now built a large collaborative research program using motus automated telemetry, stable isotopes, ecotoxicological assays, and eDNA to study the foraging and movement ecology of coastal shorebirds. 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 36, and a i10-index of 65.

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Andrea is the recipient of a College Higher Degree Supervision Excellence Award, a Women in Research Fellowship, a Women in Leadership Award, and a Vice-Chancellor’s commendation award for Excellence in Teaching.