Outreach and mentions in the popular media

For all sorts of interesting recent stories related to Israeli conservation (and not just) make sure to check out the newsletter section of the Israeli Chapter of the Society for Conservation Biology.
For various reptile related updates and insights look no further than our BloGARD.
You can listen to a podcast (in Hebrew) about some of the conservation and macroecology work we do in the lab here. You can also listen to how we combine data science and analytics in ecology and conservation research here (also in Hebrew) or here.

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May 2022
as part of the 'Desert from Within' festival, we conducted tours to the public in the nearby 'En Avdat' reserve talking about this unique place, enjoying its wonders, and talking about the use of new digital sources for ecology and conservation.

Visitors enjoying the En Avdat reserve

As part of an important initiative of many conservation organizations including the IUCN Species Survival Commission, a new report came out highlighting aquatic species in need of conservation attention Fantastic Freshwater: 50 landmark species for conservation. This report also includes our own hula painted frog - the coolest species of them all!

The Hula painted frog sampled for saliva (and generally being cool!)

April 2022
After 18 years of laborious work by many experts globally - finally the first 'complete' global reptile assessment is out, with its main findings published in the journal Nature. This important work received a lot of media attention including from the New York Times, the Guardian, and CNN. In Israel this work also reached the popular media - in ynet, N12 news, Israel Hayom and you can also listen to a short piece about it in Hebrew in the Israeli National Radio (from 1:03:20).

Sinai agama in the mountains of Eilat

February 2022
Our paper describing the phenomenon of societal extinction of species is now published in the journal Trends in Ecology and the Environment. It is garnered a lot of attention from many places across the globe. A nice popular piece we wrote about it can be found in Current Conservation.

Cultural knowledge of the thylacine was lost in mainland Australia after the species went extinct there (Photo: E.J. Keller Baker).

January 2022
Our paper in Nature on the major declines faced by many populations of vertebrates got some headlines. See here in the Jerusalem post in English,Today FR 24 in French, Nota Global in Spanish and, Ynet in Hebrew. You can also listen to a podcast about it in English here (starting at 49:34).

White-headed ducks - populations of this species are declining globally (photo: Bouke ten Cate)

October 2021
Gopal's paper on phylogenetic endemism got some interest from the Israeli and international media. You can read about it here, and here in English, here in Hebrew, and even in Hungarian... A short podcast regarding it in Hebrew can be found here, and another one here (starting at 37:50). You can also have a look at this amazing infographic Gopal prepared.

A western swamp turtle wearing an algae coat (photo: Gerald Kuchling)

September 2021
Has people’s awareness of biodiversity and conservation actions increased in the 2010s? In a new report by On the Edge Conservation led by Gabriel with Diogo Verissimo we explored these Aichi 1 targets. We used Google Trends and Wikipedia data across all countries and found that while interest in biodiversity has generally increased, knowledge about how to protect it - less so.

August 2021
Yael Lehnardt's (from Oded-Berger-Tal's lab) work exploring the detrimental potential reach of noise pollution from roads in Israel has been publicized in Haaretz newspaper. You can also hear her talk about this issue in this video (starting from  01:06:00). The main findings of this work can be found (in Hebrew) in a dedicated article to this topic the journal 'Ecology and the Environment'.

July 2021
Victor's paper explored COVID-19 lockdown effects on coral reef fishes in the Red Sea. Following his publication in the journal Biological Conservation, Victor's work was featured in ynet.

Reef fishes in Eilat during the lockdown 2020 (photo Omri Omasi)

June 2021
Victor has just received the prestigious Red Sea Reef Foundation grant to fund part of his project dedicated to producing a machine learning tool for fish identification from, a multitude of sources. Receiving this grant has attracted some attention from the popular media to this important project and you can read more about it in Green Prophet, EurekAlert, Bima (in Hebrew) and the BGU website (also in Hebrew here), or listen to Victor talk about this project on the Israeli National Radio.

Sea survey (photo - Asaf Zvuluni)

May 2021
Reut's paper as part of the special section in Conservation Biology is dedicated to interest in local plants among Israelis, while comparing data from Wikipedia pageviews and Google searches. Reut spoke on the Israeli National Radio and Galatz - the army radio (from minute 37:40) about her work, and it also received attention from local news outlets, and Ben-Gurion university's website.

Sea squill - one of the symbols of autumn in Israel

April 2021
A new special section dedicated to conservation culturomics is out in the journal Conservation Biology. This section has various contribution centering on conceptual or methodological advancements, as well as highlighting key case studies that can help advance this field, and generally promote the use of large online data to help promote biodiversity conservation.

February 2021
Our paper on COVID-19 effects on urbanization of large mammals in North America was recently published in Biological Conservation. It was also picked up by the ynet news and the Zavit science and environment news agency (in Hebrew), and also in the Jewish Journal and Mongabay in English.

Black Bear in the Grand Teton National Park

June 2020
Our paper on the plight of the mountain gazelle during the past century published in Oryx, also has an accompanying blog in the Oryx blog for an easier read. You can also find it in the Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel , in the Israel science info blog in French, here in German, here in Spanish. A very comprehensive overview of the work can be found in Hebrew in Haaretz.

Mountain gazelle male in central Israel

May 2020
Rikki Gumbs's paper on global priorities for conservation of reptilian phylogenetic diversity in the face of human impacts published in Nature Communications got a lot of traction globally also from CNN and the BBC. You can also read Rikki's blog on this in Nature, or listen to his podcat about it in the planet pod. If you prefer you can also read about it in many other languages including: Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Italian, French, Turkish, Romanian, Slovakian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Farsi, and Sinhalese!

There is never a bad reason to show an aye aye

April 2020
Ivan Jaric led a group of international scientists to establish iEcology as a new field which aims to study of ecological patterns and processes using data generated for other purposes and stored digitally. The conceptualization of this field with some of its possibilities and challenges was published in TREE, and managed to get some international attention from the media in Germany, France, Italy, Israel and other places.

January 2020
Alex Pigot and Catherine Sheard led a big effort to map the links between form, function, and their evolutionary heritage of all global birds. This work (and the publicly available dataset) were published in Nature Ecology and evolution. These findings also got a lot of popular media attention from all over the world - Spain, UK, Ireland, Guatemala, Mexico, China, Costa-Rica, Germany, and others.

July 2019
Ricardo Correia wrote a nice commentary in Mongabay about conservation culturomics in general and specifically regarding the caution needed when using Google trends data - following our paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment

March 2019
A new publication in PLoS Biology, which was lead by John Mittermeier, explored the seasonal component of human's interactions with nature. This work got a lot of attention from various sources including: the Telegraph newspaper, the Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, Mongabay, and many others.
You can also listen to a short interview (in Hebrew) relating to this work here.

Seasonal Anemone blossoms in the Western Negev are visited by large crowds in late winter and early spring

Aug. 2018
In recent months there have been several publication in both popular and scientific outlets regarding 'compassionate conservation'. Together with: Jonathan Belmaker, Shirli Bar-David, Roi Dor, Enav Vidan, David Saltz, Yoram Yom-Tov, Irina Levinsky, Shai Meiri, Ittai Renan, Assaf Shwartz, Orr Spiegel, and Oded Berger-Tal we highlighted the inherent fallacy of this approach - specifically with regard to invasive species. In a response in Hebrew in Haaretz Daily we wrote a short opinion piece, and in an essay in the Israeli journal 'Ecology and the Environment', we further elaborate on this.

Invasive little fire ants preying on a local beetle from the genus Gonocephalum sp

Jan. 2018
Both the Israeli Walla website and the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology liked the work on elucidating habitats of Hula painted frogs from the presence of their DNA remains in different water bodies. You can read a bit more about Israeli amphibians here (in Hebrew)

Nov. 2017
Our work mapping reptile distributions globally, and highlighting their particular conservation needs got over 100 mentions in different outlets, including follow-up pieces in Geographical magazine and Scientific American.

Hypsilurus papuensis, one of over 10,000 reptile species mapped in this work (photo: Alex Slavenko)

May 2016
Everybody wanted to know who are the most popular reptiles (as observed through Wikipedia page-views). Also mentioned in Mongabay and the Guardian.

Komodo dragon which is the most popular reptile across all language-specific editions of Wikipedia

Feb. 2016
The paper on possible links between neuronal requirement and migration distance in Birds got some popular media traction - also from PHYS.org.

Eurasian reed warbler - one of the species in our study