Yaron Ziv

Biodiversity patterns are shaped by processes that operate and interact over several spatial and temporal scales. Consequently, studying scale dependency and multi-scale effects is crucial for understanding abundance distribution, species richness and community composition in heterogeneous landscapes. We studied the distribution of plants (both annuals and perennials), beetles, spiders and reptiles in the heterogeneous, fragmented, highly diverse landscape of Southern Judea Lowlands. Scales in this landscape comprise within-patch sampling plots, (habitat) patches, patch clusters and land units located at different climatic regions. All taxonomic groups showed clear association to different scales in accordance with the scale-dependency approach. Furthermore, combining determinants belonging to different scales allowed better understanding of species distribution within our landscape. Finally, we used species richness partitioning (α, β, γ) to set various hypotheses on the complex associations between scale-dependent species diversity and scale-dependent determinants diversity.

This event is a co-sponsored seminar of Global Drylands Center and Hugh Hanson series