Jonathan Belmaker's research while affiliated with Tel Aviv University and other places
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Publications (132)
Understanding the causes of the arrest of species distributions has been a fundamental question in ecology and evolution. These questions are of particular interest for trees owing to their long lifespan and sessile nature. A surge in data availability evokes a macro-ecological analysis to determine the underlying forces limiting distributions. Her...
We examined Chromis viridis , a coral dwelling damselfish responses to divers in sites differing by diving pressure and by type of diving activity (recreational versus scientific). Responses of Chromis viridis, a coral dwelling damselfish, to divers in sites differing by pressure of diving and by type of diving activity (recreational versus scienti...
Recreational fishing is common around the Mediterranean Sea. The number of recreational fishers is growing, and they are using increasingly efficient fishing techniques. However, fisher activity is heterogeneous, both temporally and spatially, making it very difficult to determine this sector’s fishing pressure and annual yields. Therefore, estimat...
The positive effect of fully protected Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) on marine biodiversity, and specifically on fishes, has been widely documented. In contrast, the potential of MPAs to mitigate the impact of adverse climatic conditions has seldom been investigated. Here, we assessed the effectiveness of MPAs, quantified as increasing fish biomass...
Unlabelled:
The construction of the Suez Canal connected the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed rapid marine bio-invasion. Over the last century, several bivalve species have invaded the Levantine basin, yet their distribution and impact on the benthic community have not been thoroughly studied. Large-scale benthic surveys along the...
Marine invasive species are pervasive across the world’s coastal regions. Nevertheless, empirical quantification of their ecological effects remains limited. Here, we elucidate the interaction of the invasive silver-cheeked toadfish, Lagocephalus sceleratus, with the fish community of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, a hotspot for marine biological i...
The continuous nature of speciation implies that different species are found at different stages of divergence, from no- to complete reproductive isolation. This process and its underlying mechanisms are best viewed in incipient species. Moreover, the species complex can offer unique insight into how reproductive isolation (RI) has evolved. The roy...
Aim
In the context of intensifying threats of climate change on marine communities, ecological models are widely applied for conservation strategies, though polar studies remain scarce given the limited number of datasets available. Correlative (e.g. species distribution models, SDM) and mechanistic (e.g. dynamic energy budget models, DEB) modellin...
Understanding space-use patterns in parrotfish (Scarini) is especially important for coral reefs, where herbivores play a key role in maintaining reef health. However, we lack the long-term high-resolution data needed to understand parrotfish space-use patterns over time. We examine long-term space-use dynamics in parrotfish (median duration: 359 d...
Aim:
Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional variation in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distance...
Biological invasion is one of the main components of global changes in aquatic ecosystems. Unraveling how establishment in novel environments affects key biological features of animals is a key step towards understanding invasion. Gut microbiome of herbivorous animals is important for host health but has been scarcely assessed in invasive species....
Direct and indirect impacts by invasive animals on plants and other animals through predation and competition have been evidenced in many ecosystems. For instance, the rabbitfish Siganus rivulatus, originating from the Red Sea, is now the most abundant species in costal habitats of South-Eastern Mediterranean Sea where it overgrazes algae. However,...
Understanding the causes of the arrest of species distributions has been a fundamental question in ecology and evolution. For trees, these questions are of particular interest due to their long lifespan and sessile nature. A surge in data-availability evokes for a macro-ecological analysis to determine the underlying forces limiting distributions....
Constructing the Suez Canal connected the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, allowing rapid marine bio-invasion. Over the last century, several bivalve species have invaded the Levantine basin, yet their distribution and impact on the benthic community have not been thoroughly studied. Large-scale benthic surveys along the rocky substrate of the Is...
The common lionfish, Pterois miles , a notoriously invasive species known for its harmful effect on native fish communities in the Atlantic Ocean, has recently begun spreading across the Mediterranean Sea. The wide niche breadth of the lionfish has been hypothesized to facilitate its invasion success. However, it is unclear to what extent this wide...
The positive ecological effect of fully protected Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) on fish populations has been widely explored. Key indicators of fully protected MPAs effectiveness include an increase in biomass, density, and body size of commercially exploited large fishes. Fully protected MPAs are also hypothesized to be more resilient to both mari...
Aim
Recurrent species assemblages integrate important biotic interactions and joint responses to environmental and spatial filters that enable local coexistence. Here, we applied a bipartite (site–species) network approach to develop a natural typology of lakes sharing distinct fish faunas and provide a detailed, hierarchical view of their bioregio...
A large body of ecological theory predicts that non‐indigenous species (NIS) are successful invaders if their niches overlap little with native taxa. Native–non‐indigenous trait dissimilarity, however, may also be observed if NIS have outcompeted ecologically similar native species. Discriminating these scenarios is essential for assessing invasion...
Fishes are subject to numerous stressors, including climate change, fishing and impacts by alien species. One of the challenges in understanding species and community responses to these stressors is identifying how they modify predator–prey interactions, a key process shaping aquatic food webs. Here, we aim to synthesize how species traits, such as...
Aim
Whether marine species can respond to ocean warming by changing their depth remains controversial. Some evidence suggests that species can deepen to cope with warming climates, whereas other studies have found ecologically constrained depth distributions. Our study focuses on generalizing the depth response of species to warming and elucidating...
Marine protected areas (MPAs) play a leading role in conserving and restoring marine environments. MPAs can benefit both marine populations within their boundaries and external populations owing to a net export of organisms (spillover). However, little is known about variation in performance within MPAs. For example, edge effects may degrade popula...
Invasive alien species are repeatedly shown to be amongst the top threats to biodiversity globally. Robust indicators for measuring the status and trends of biological invasions are lacking, but essential for monitoring biological invasions and the effectiveness of interventions. Here, we formulate and demonstrate three such indicators that capture...
Invasive species are one of many anthropogenic challenges to maintaining a healthy marine ecosystem. Two rabbitfish species (Siganus rivulatus and Siganus luridus) are among the more successful migrants from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, where their intense foraging has caused damage to the algae community, thus reducing primary production and...
The global lockdown to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic health risks has altered human interactions with nature. Here, we report immediate impacts of changes in human activities on wildlife and environmental threats during the early lockdown months of 2020, based on 877 qualitative reports and 332 quantitative assessments from 89 different studies. Hundr...
The COVID-19 pandemic provides a rare opportunity to examine effects of people on natural systems and processes. Here, we collected fish diversity data from coral reefs at the Israeli Gulf of Aqaba during and after the COVID-19 lockdown. We examined beach entrances to the reef, nearby shallow reefs and deeper areas exposed mostly to divers. We foun...
Nonindigenous species are considered among the major threats to biodiversity. A deep understanding of the processes underlying invasion is impeded, among others, by insufficient taxonomic and distributional knowledge. The Mediterranean Sea is experiencing a large invasion by Red Sea species as a result of the opening of the Suez Canal, at a rate wh...
Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances, i.e., β-diversity, is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional turnover in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distances. We p...
Seascape complexity is an important driver of ecological processes in marine systems. Today, high resolution, multiscale bathymetric data is being collected due to rapid advances in marine technologies and image processing, drastically improving the detailed mapping of the physical structure of the seascape. However, these data are rarely synthesiz...
Marine biota are redistributing at a rapid pace in response to climate change and shifting seascapes. While changes in fish populations and community structure threaten the sustainability of fisheries, our capacity to adapt by tracking and projecting marine species remains a challenge due to data discontinuities in biological observations,
lack of...
The ongoing digital revolution in the age of big data is opening new research opportunities. Culturomics and iEcology, two emerging research areas based on the analysis of online data resources, can provide novel scientific insights and inform conservation and management efforts. To date, culturomics and iEcology have been applied primarily in the...
Marine biota are redistributing at a rapid pace in response to climate change and shifting seascapes. While changes in fish populations and community structure threaten the sustainability of fisheries, our capacity to adapt by tracking and projecting marine species remains a challenge due to data discontinuities in biological observations, lack of...
Aim
The ‘abundant centre’ hypothesis states that species are more abundant at the centre of their range. However, several recent large‐scale studies have failed to find evidence for such a pattern. Here we used extensive global data of reef fishes to test the ‘abundant centre’ pattern, and to examine variation in the abundance patterns across speci...
Spatial and temporal niche partitioning are common strategies to reduce competition between closely related species. While spatial partitioning is widely studied, temporal partitioning, especially in marine environments, is much less documented. The lionfish Pterois miles is common in the Red Sea and have recently established populations within the...
Marine biota is redistributing at a rapid pace in response to climate change and shifting seascapes. While changes in fish populations and community structure threaten the sustainability of fisheries, our capacity to adapt by tracking and projecting marine species remains a challenge due to data discontinuities in biological observations, lack of d...
Halophila stipulacea is a small tropical seagrass, native to the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. It invaded the Mediterranean Sea 150 years ago as a Lessepsian migrant, but so far has remained in insulated, small populations across this basin. Surprisingly, in 2002 it was reported in the Caribbean Sea, where within less than two decade...
Species distribution models (SDMs) correlate species occurrences with environmental predictors, and can be used to forecast distributions under future climates. SDMs have been criticized for not explicitly including the physiological processes underlying the species response to the environment. Recently, new methods have been suggested to combine S...
Stingrays and guitarfish are globally threatened by overexploitation, particularly so in the Mediterranean Sea. Nevertheless, very little information is known about their ecology, behaviour, and taxonomy in the Mediterranean, and especially in the Levant, where water temperature, salinity, and the impact of invasive species are relatively high. Alt...
Protected areas are central to biodiversity conservation. For marine fish, marine protected areas (MPAs) often harbour more individuals, especially of species targeted by fisheries. But precise pathways of biodiversity change remain unclear. For example, how local‐scale responses combine to affect regional biodiversity, important for managing spati...
Alien species may be a valuable resource for marine fisheries, yet their contribution to the catch might be balanced by negative effects on indigenous species. In this study, we explored a unique high-resolution time series of catch data from a highly invaded ecosystem in the eastern Mediterranean. We analyzed over 5000 fishing hauls digitalizing f...
It is often assumed that species in richer sites are more specialized, but empirical studies show conflicting results. In the present study, we quantify the correlation between community‐level niche breadth and richness. We contrast three mechanisms for gradients in niche breadth: climate, community assembly and nested interactions. First, the clim...
Aim: Understanding the mechanisms determining species richness is a primary goal of biogeography. Richness patterns of subgroups within a taxon are usually assumed to be driven by similar processes. However, if richness of distinct ecological strategies respond differently to the same processes, inferences made for an entire taxon may be misleading...
Fish size at maturation influences lifetime reproductive success and is an important parameter in managing stocks. Fish tend to reach maturity at a smaller size in warmer water; however, the generality of this pattern is a matter of controversy. The mechanisms by which temperature influences fish size at maturation are not well understood, particul...
Artisanal fisheries are globally common, providing almost 50% of total world landings. However, due to overfishing, they are worldwide on the verge of collapse. Fisheries in the eastern Mediterranean Levantine Basin must additionally cope with extreme thermal conditions, meaning that fish are typically smaller relative to other regions. In Israel,...
A critical question in invasion ecology is how the native species community and the exotic species affect one another. It is commonly postulated that exotics negatively impact the native community’s biodiversity, and that a rich native community can inhibit the establishment of exotics. This hypothesis can be examined using the native−exotic richne...
Deciphering the global distribution of polyploid plants is fundamental for understanding plant evolution and ecology. Many factors have been hypothesized to affect the uneven distribution of polyploid plants across the globe. Nevertheless, the lack of large comparative datasets has restricted such studies to local floras and to narrow taxonomical s...
Movement is essential for understanding the distribution and abundance of animals. While it has been suggested that invasion success can be facilitated by species’ ability to adapt to novel environments, direct comparisons of movement patterns between native and invaded ranges of animals in their natural habitat are rare. The rivulated rabbitfish S...
Invading predators can negatively affect naïve prey populations due to a lack of evolved defenses. Many species therefore may be at risk of extinction due to overexploitation by exotic predators. Yet the strong selective effect of predation might drive evolution of imperiled prey toward more resistant forms, potentially allowing the prey to persist...
Aim
The negative correlation between temperature and body size of ectothermic animals (broadly known as the temperature‐size rule or TSR) is a widely observed pattern, especially in aquatic organisms. Studies have claimed that the TSR arises due to decreased oxygen solubility and increasing metabolic costs at warmer temperatures, whereby oxygen sup...
Aim
The negative correlation between temperature and body size of ectothermic animals (broadly known as the temperature-size rule or TSR) is a widely observed pattern, especially in aquatic organisms. Studies have claimed that TSR arises due to decreased oxygen solubility and increasing metabolic costs at warmer temperatures, whereby oxygen supply...
Ecologists must understand how marine life responds to changing local conditions, rather than to overall global temperature rise, say Amanda E. Bates and 16 colleagues. Ecologists must understand how marine life responds to changing local conditions, rather than to overall global temperature rise.
Wormlions are fly larvae that construct pit-traps in loose soil and ambush prey that fall into their pits. They occur in high numbers in cities, below any man-made shelter providing protection from direct sunlight, such as a concrete roof with a thin layer of sand at the ground. Their natural habitat is either caves or any natural structure that pr...
Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time se...
Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time se...
Motivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community led open-source database of biodiversity time se...
During the last few decades the fish community has changed substantially along the Eastern Mediterranean continental shelf, which is a hotspot of invasion by species that had migrated via the Suez Canal. Trawl data from the Israeli coast spanning two periods (1990–1994 and 2008–2011) were compared to identify species with substantial variation in t...
Genetic variation, as a basis of evolutionary change, allows species to adapt and persist in different climates and environments. Yet, a comprehensive assessment of the drivers of genetic variation at different spatial scales is still missing in marine ecosystems. Here, we investigated the influence of environment, geographic isolation, and larval...
Dispersal and biotic interactions analyses data.
(XLSX)
Summary of data collected on each paper for each objective during the literature review.
(DOCX)
Data collected on each paper for the objectives outlined in S2 File.
(XLSX)
There is ample evidence that biotic factors, such as biotic interactions and dispersal capacity, can affect species distributions and influence species' responses to climate change. However, little is known about how these factors affect predictions from species distribution models (SDMs) with respect to spatial grain and extent of the models.Under...
Scatterplots depicting the relationship between spatial grains and spatial extents of studies in S1 Table and S3 File.
(DOCX)
Citation information for papers included in the literature review.
(XLSX)
Ecologists have often predicted that species' niche breadths should decline towards the Equator. Dan Janzen arrived at this prediction based on climatic constraints, while Robert MacArthur argued that a latitudinal gradient in resource specialization drives the pattern. This idea has some support when it comes to thermal niches, but has rarely been...
