Studying large-scale ecological processes and patterns presents a major challenge in contemporary ecology. The recently accepted development of island biogeography, metapopulation dynamics and a neutral unified theory of biodiversity opened new opportunities for understanding species distribution and composition at the landscape and regional scales. The Spatial Ecology Lab attempts to advance the study of Landscape Ecology and Macroecology by striving to understand how scale-dependent evolutionary and ecological processes interact to reveal the observed species diversity and community structure at different spatiotemporal scales.

Current Projects

1. Theoretical development of the effect of environmental heterogeneity on species diversity and community structure, using a process-based, landscape-oriented, population-level simulation model (SHALOM©)

2. Effects of environmental heterogeneity of the Western Negev Desert on psammomic rodent species diversity and community structure

3. Multiscale effects of interactive local and landscape-scale processes on species diversity of beetles, spiders and reptiles at the Southern Judea Lowlands

4. Effects of isolation and patch size on species diversity of coral-reef fishes in the Red Sea

5. Effects of biogeographic regions on the division of alpha, beta and gamma diversities at different spatial scales

6. Studying spatially oriented distribution patterns of rare species at the Western Negev sandy habitats as an ecological basis for management planning and conservation practice

Recent Publications

Belmaker, J., Ziv, Y., and Shashar, N. 2009. Small-scale isolation and predation modify the distribution of coral-obligate fish. Marine Biology, in press.

Geraldes, A., Basset, P., Gibson, B., Smith, K. L., Harr, B., Yu, H.-T., Bulatova, N., Ziv, Y. and Nachman, M. W. 2008. Inferring the history of speciation in house mice from autosomal, x-linked, y-linked and mitochondrial genes. Molecular Ecology 17:5349-5363.

Yaacobi, G., Ziv, Y. and Rosenzweig, M.L. 2007. Habitat fragmentation may not matter to species diversity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B (London) 274:2409-2412.

Keasar, T., Sadeh, A., Shilo, M. and Ziv, Y. 2007. Social organization and pollination efficiency in the carpenter bee Xylocopa pubescens (L.) (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Anthophoridae). Entomologia Generalis 29:225-236.

Belmaker, J., Ziv, Y., Shashar, N. and Connolly, S. 2008. Regional variation in the hierarchical partitioning of alpha and beta diversity in coral-dwelling fishes. Ecology 88:2829-2840.

Ph.D. University of Arizona, 1998