Persistent Digital Identifiers (UIDs)
ORCID :
is 0000-0002-1334-4887
Job Type
Teaching/Education
Research
Institutional Management
Subject Area
Biological Oceanography, Marine Ecology
Activities
At IOLR I established and head the marine community ecology lab since 2009 and since august 2016 I head the marine biology
department. I am also a faculty member in the marine biology department at the
Charney School of Marine Sciences at Haifa University. I have been studying the ecology of coastal communities (coral reefs,
rocky shores and recently, seagrass) for the past 25 years in many biogeographic regions (Mediterranean, red sea, pacific and
Atlantic and Caribbean coasts). This includes ecological surveys and field and
lab experiments on benthic-pelagic coupling (larval recruitment), species interactions,
biodiversity and more. I have 55 publications
in peer-reviewed journals and 4 book chapters, and I edited a springer book on Marine
Bioinvasions. On the international arena, I received an EU Marie Curie grant, was a partner in 3 European Union-FP7 projects, am now part of the core group of a new cost-action project on marine
conservation in European waters, was a PI on a joint Israel-Germany grant
(BMBF) comparing climate change impacts in the Baltic and east Mediterranean
seas, and I recently received a BSF-NSF grant for climate
change research on rocky intertidal ecosystems. My lab currently runs the
national monitoring program on rocky shore biodiversity, and investigates the
ecology and biodiversity of Mediterranean coastal communities, and the effects
of bioinvasions, climate change (warming, acidification, sea level rise and
extreme events) and marine protected areas on these communities and their
functions (most of the results thus far are in different stages of
publication). My students also studied sea turtle ecology and conservation,
shark populations in the eastern Mediterranean as well as seagrass ecology and
mapping in the red sea. I am a lead author of the marine ecosystems chapter of
the upcoming national ecosystem assessment of Israel aiming to assess marine
ecosystem services. As part of a BALTMED project with GEOMAR (Kiel, Germany),
my lab has constructed several innovative experimental installations (including a large mesocosm facility) to test the effects
of warming and acidification on benthic species,
communities and ecosystem functions which will
provide in years to come valuable insights on the impacts of climate change on
Mediterranean ecological communities. In 2015 I also run a citizen-science
project on human uses and activity in a Mediterranean marine reserve in Haifa.
I so far supervised 14 MSc students (2 current) and
8 PhD students (5 current) and
1 post-doc.
Sea regions of study
Mediterranean Sea - Eastern Basin
North Atlantic Ocean
Red Sea
Skills
I have training in biology, marine ecology and conservation.
I am a Divermaster.
I am also a Faculty and Senior Lecturer at the Marine Biology Department in the Charney School of Marine Studies, at the University of Haifa where I teach marine ecology.
In my research I use a lot multivariate analysis to analyze community data.
