People
I've always loved to solve the puzzles of the natural world around us, and to try to understand some parts of this enormous complexity. My work in the past ranged from the self-organization of specific plant species in space to landscape-scale colonization by different tree species and the formation of novel ecosystems. My questions come from the natural ecosystems and are based on field observations and research. However, I like to also use all kinds of statistical, theoretical, and spatial models as tools for answering these questions. As a researcher at the faculty of agriculture, food and environment, I want to continue doing basic and applied (conservation focused) ecological research, as well as agriculturally-oriented studies.
Lab manager Email: masci2008@gmail.com Tel: ++972-8-9489520
Rotem is a postdoctoral fellow (and lab PhD graduate) working on combined water and nutrient limitation in diverse herbaceous plant communities.
Katja is a postdoctoral fellow studying the resilience of dryland ecosystems to climatic changes. Her work combines modeling and field analyses to understand changes in Mediterranean woodlands forests.
Moshe is a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Omri Finkel and our lab (and a lab PhD graduate) working on the function and evolution of dinitrogen fixation in Mediterranean ecosystems.
SImon is a PhD candidate, working on the demographic, ecophysiological and hydrological processes that affect the survival of oak populations at the driest most Southern edge of their global distribution.
Hagay is a PhD candidate and a KKL forest expert. His research aims to discover the main factors that determine the success and failure of afforestation with Mediterranean broadleave trees.
Amit is an Msc student studying the connection between regulation of symbiotic nitrogen fixation and nitrogen concentrations in different plant organs of a diversity of legume species.
Gat is a master student studying the growth and survival of Mediterranean broadleaf forest species.
Lab alumni
Roni is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab, using extra-cool combinations of remote sensing, statistics and machine learning to study Mediterranean vegetation at large scales, and to unravel the effects of climate change on the woody vegetation in Israel.
Yakir is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and in our lab. His work combines experiments and models to explain the effects of dryland tree hydraulics and climate change on Mediterranean vegetation.
Denis' masters research examines the organization of leaf area cover in pine forests along the rainfall gradient in Israel. He focused on comparing leaf traits among forest trees and shrubs. Denis' research is with Dr. Yagil Osem (Volcani ARO).
Roni is a master student working with Dr. Yagil Osem (Volcani ARO) and in our lab. Her research focuses on the effect of forest thinning treatments on the organization of leaf area and leaf traits of the vegetation growing under the trees in planted pine forests.
Tamar is doing her MSc studies with Dr. Guy Dovrat (Newe Ya'ar ARO) and in our lab. Her research aims at linking the characteristics of legume seeds and the strategies of symbiotic nitrogen fixation in a large suite of common species of legumes.
Ilan is a PhD candidate. Ilan's research aims at explaining the importance of commonly-used plant traits and how they influence the success of plant species in competition.
Shaked is a master student studying the costs and benefits of symbiotic nitrogen fixation in legume shrubs under different treatments of fire, grazing and vegetation harvesting. She works with Dr. Guy Dovrat (Newe Ya'ar ARO) and in our lab.
Ken lives up north in kibbutz Hukuk. His M.Sc research focused on Tetraclinis articulata, an alien tree planted in Israel four decades ago but only now started propagating at a notable high rate. In his research Ken studied the biological and ecological factors that have turned this alien tree into a potentially invasive species. I am very interested in both agriculture and forestry and
Postdoctoral fellow As a rancher and field researcher my research focuses on the links between resource availability, community structure and ecosystem function in water-limited plant communities. My fields of interests span animal-plant interactions, to functional traits and functional diversity-productivity relations.
Hila was an MSc student in the lab. Her research focused on the reproductive and nitrogen fixation strategies of Mediterranean annual legumes. The study aimed to solve the paradox of coexistence of nitrogen fixing annual legumes with non-fixing competitors in nitrogen-deficient Mediterranean ecosystem.
Yoav did a research project in his 3rd year, in which he studied how domestication of wild pea has influenced its dinitrogen fixation efficiency. Yoav is now a master student working on plankton ecology at the Inter-University Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat.
Yoni was a postdoctoral student in the lab 2018-2021. He studied the effects of climatic regime in the last decades on the structure and cover of woody Mediterranean vegetation in Israel. Yoni also led a study on bacteria composition in root nodules of C. villosa.
Anil came from Nepal and he is now living back in Nepal. His MSc research, as a student in the international program for master in plant science studied how nutrient limitation influence nitrogen fixation in a suite of natural and agricultural (chickpea) legume species.
Moshe graduated his PhD at Tel-Aviv University (co-advised by Eyal Ben-Dor and Efrat). Moshe's research used hyperspectral and multispectral remote sensing to model the content on nutrients in Mediterranean forests.