Dr Elisa Girola

I am the Project Manager for the Threatened Species Index (TSX) with the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) at The University of Queensland. The TSX brings together long-term monitoring data from across Australia to estimate population trends for threatened and near-threatened species. My role is to ensure the continuity and ongoing development of the Index, working with data custodians and partners across government, natural resource management, NGOs, universities and citizen science to bring new data into the TSX and expand its coverage. This includes developing partnerships, supporting the integration and analysis of monitoring data, and producing reliable trends across taxonomic groups, regions and management contexts. I have a particular interest in developing approaches that allow emerging technologies and high-volume sensor data, such as acoustic recordings, to complement more traditional ecological monitoring methods while retaining the consistency and robustness needed to detect changes in biodiversity over time.

Alongside the TSX, I work on the challenges of managing and harmonising global-scale, long-term environmental datasets. I am involved in the Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI) which is developing approaches for harmonising ecological monitoring data across continents and research networks. The project aims to make distributed environmental observations more useful for global ecological research.

Publications

2026

Velasquez, E., Eyre, T. J., Girola, E., Morris, B. (2026). Bridging the Data Divide: An Examination of Vegetation Data Challenges and Opportunities in Queensland. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, 135, 17-37. 10.53060/prsq.135.2

2023

Girola, E., Dunlop, R. A., & Noad, M. J. (2023). Singing humpback whales respond to wind noise, but not to vessel noise. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 290(1998), 20230204. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.0204

2022

Girola, E., Dunlop, R. A., & Noad, M. J. (2022). Singing in a noisy ocean: Vocal plasticity in male humpback whales. Bioacoustics, 32(3), 301-324. https://doi.org/10.1080/09524622.2022.2122560

2020

Indeck, K. L., Girola, E., Torterotot, M., Noad, M. J., & Dunlop, R. A. (2020). Adult female-calf acoustic communication signals in migrating east Australian humpback whales. Bioacoustics, 30(3), 341–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/09524622.2020.1742204

2019

Girola, E., Noad, M. J., Dunlop, R. A., & Cato, D. H. (2019). Source levels of humpback whales decrease with frequency suggesting an air-filled resonator is used in sound production. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145(2), 869–880. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5090492