Jonathan Tichon, David Saltz and Shirli Bar-David

​ This research aims at monitoring and assessing the underlying risks and threats for the threatened Nubian ibex (Capra nubiana) population of the Judean Desert for conservation and management purposes. We focus on several streams simultaneously (demography, behavioural, and genetics) in order to get better insights on the actual status and processes of this population.

The methods that are being used are:

§  Surveys (by foot and using camera-traps) to determine occupancy

§  Telemetry (GPS) to assess ibex’s movement patterns in fine- and coarse-scales (daily and seasonal movements), dynamics, activity centres, and connectivity between the Negev Highlands and the Judean Desert populations and between sub-populations within the Judean Desert 

§  Abundance/density estimation of the population of the Judean Desert using camera-traps and Spatial Mark-Resight (SMR) models. We do so by marking individuals (ear tags), position arrays of camera-traps (to gain spatial-resight data) and incorporating spatial data from the GPS-collars to increase overall model’s accuracy.