Our vision
We live in an era of unprecedented human-driven environmental change. Urbanization, biological invasions, climate change, habitat fragmentation, and large-scale disturbances are reshaping ecosystems at a pace unmatched in recent history. Together, these processes alter species distributions, create novel ecological communities, and generate new evolutionary pressures that challenge our understanding of biodiversity in the Anthropocene.
Our lab investigates these changes by taking advantage of one of ecology’s greatest opportunities: repeated natural experiments. Cities, biological invasions, islands, wars, and other human-modified landscapes repeatedly expose ecological communities to similar environmental challenges under different geographical and historical settings. By comparing these independent experiments across space, time, and taxa, we seek to identify the general ecological and evolutionary principles governing biodiversity in novel environments.
A central theme of our research is the intersection between urban ecology, island biogeography, and invasion biology. We view cities as archipelagos of fragmented habitats, biological invasions as ecological colonization events, and islands as natural laboratories for understanding many of the same processes that operate in urban ecosystems. By integrating these complementary perspectives, we aim to understand how ecological communities assemble, how species adapt to environmental novelty, and how human societies shape biodiversity across multiple spatial and temporal scales.
Our research combines long-term ecological monitoring, comparative field studies, behavioral and evolutionary experiments, museum collections, bioacoustics, remote sensing, large biodiversity databases, spatial modeling, and citizen science. Integrating evidence from local field experiments to global comparative analyses allows us to bridge fundamental ecological theory with practical conservation.
Urban Ecology and Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research
Cities are among the largest ecological transformations humans have ever created, yet they remain one of the least understood ecosystems from a long-term ecological perspective.
To address this challenge, we initiated Urban LTER Israel, a national interdisciplinary consortium establishing long-term socio-ecological monitoring across Israeli cities. The program investigates how biodiversity, climate, ecosystem processes, and human societies interact over space and time, providing an unprecedented framework for understanding urban ecosystem dynamics.
Within the Urban LTER, our lab investigates the biogeography of reptiles, mammals, and arthropods across urban gradients in Haifa and Be’er Sheva, asking why some species successfully colonize cities while others disappear and how biogeographic patterns relate to urban characteristics. We also study how urban environmental conditions shape species ecology and evolution, e.g., how anthropogenic noise and substrate-borne vibrations influence acoustic communication and behavior in vocalizing reptiles such as geckos? Together, these projects aim to reveal how cities shape biodiversity from individuals to entire ecological communities while generating knowledge that supports more biodiverse and resilient urban environments.
Adaptation to Novel Environments
Urbanization, species introductions, and insularity (including through habitat fragmentation) expose organisms to remarkably similar ecological challenges despite occurring in very different parts of the world.
We investigate how organisms respond to these novel environments through changes in morphology, behavior, life-history strategies, diet, and ecological interactions. Our research asks whether adaptation follows predictable trajectories and whether similar selective pressures repeatedly generate similar evolutionary outcomes.
Our current work in this context focuses on the impacts of novel environments (urban vs. non-urban, native vs. introduced range) on defensive mechanisms of geckos, funded by BSF in collaboration with Kinsey Brock. By comparing populations across multiple cities, habitats, and species, in the Mediterranean Basin and North America, we seek to identify general rules governing adaptation to human-modified environments.
Biological Invasions and Novel Species Interactions
Biological invasions provide some of the clearest opportunities to observe ecological and evolutionary change in real time.
Our research explores why some introduced species become highly successful while others fail, how they modify ecological communities, and whether invasion outcomes are predictable across different ecosystems. We are particularly interested in how urbanization facilitates invasions and how invasions, in turn, reshape urban biodiversity.
Our current flagship project in this direction investigates the ongoing invasion of the ringed wall gecko (Tarentola annularis) in southern Israel. By studying its ecology, reproduction, diet, dispersal, and interactions with native reptiles, we aim to understand both the mechanisms driving invasion success and the ecological consequences for native communities. Another project examines invasion dynamics and dispersal pathways in plants (Oxalis pes-caprae), providing broader insights into dispersal mechanisms and invasion ecology across taxonomic groups.
Biogeography Across Scales
Why do some species thrive in cities while closely related species do not? Why are some regions consistently more susceptible to biological invasions? How do human activities reshape natural biogeographic patterns?
Our lab addresses these questions by combining large biodiversity databases, spatial analyses, and comparative ecology to identify broad-scale drivers of species distributions and community assembly, and the ecological consequences of habitat fragmentation and island-like systems created by human activities. Current projects investigate the global patterns and underlying mechanisms of urban affinity in mammals (their tendency to live in urban areas), syndromes of life history traits and success in urban and island populations.
By integrating local field studies with global comparative analyses, we connect processes operating at individual sites with patterns emerging across continents.
Extreme Disturbance and Warfare Ecology
Extreme societal events provide rare opportunities to understand how ecosystems respond to rapid changes in human activity.
Our lab leads one of the first long-term ecological studies investigating the biodiversity legacy of warfare, focusing as a case study on the war in northern Israel, that started in October 2023. The temporary evacuation of entire communities between October 2023-March 2025, followed by renewed human activity and habitat disturbance, created a unique natural experiment for understanding how wildlife responds to abrupt changes in anthropogenic pressure.
By following ecological communities before, during, and after these disturbances, we seek to better understand ecosystem resilience, community reassembly, and the long-term consequences of human-induced environmental change.
Biodiversity and Human Societies
Biodiversity cannot be understood without considering the people who shape it.
Our research explores how cultural diversity, historical legacies, religious traditions, management practices, and human perceptions influence biodiversity patterns and conservation outcomes. We investigate how different stakeholders perceive, value, and manage nature within human-dominated landscapes, recognizing that successful conservation depends as much on people as on ecological processes.
A particular focus of our work is the ecology and conservation value of urban cemeteries. Although primarily designed as cultural and religious spaces, cemeteries frequently function as unexpectedly important refuges for native biodiversity within highly urbanized landscapes. We investigate their ecological communities, conservation potential, ecosystem services, and the ways in which cultural history and management practices shape biodiversity. By studying cemeteries as coupled social-ecological systems, we aim to identify strategies that simultaneously preserve both natural and cultural heritage while enhancing urban biodiversity conservation. Our current work in this context is in collaboration with Jonathan Jeschke, Tanja Straka, and Christian Voigt.
Other regular collaborators include the labs of Shai Meiri, Panayiotis Pafilis, Johannes Foufopoulos, and Uri Roll.
We ar also members in the CURT initiative, for comparative studies across cities.
Human Impacts on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics 