Anne Peters

I am a behavioural ecologist interested in understanding how animals balance investment in reproduction and self-maintenance, and the consequences of this for individual success and population persistence. Since 2005, my research group has been studying ecology and behaviour of purple-crowned fairy-wrens. They are endangered cooperatively breeding birds inhabiting riparian zones in the monsoonal savanna of NW-Australia. We follow individually marked birds throughout life to establish their movements, breeding attempts, lifespan, and lifetime reproduction. We aim to answer questions across several areas such as cooperative breeding (the complex behavioural strategies that group living birds employ to advance their success); health (what factors impinge on immune defense and damage control and how this relates to aging) and global change: the impacts of climate change and other anthropogenic changes on wildlife. Currently, we aim to identify the environmental factors that buffer these impacts, with the ultimate goal of improving our ability to forecast biodiversity impacts of global change forecasts and to develop strategies to mitigate impacts.