Many of Israel’s nature reserves, especially in the south, have either secondary land use (e.g., army training grounds) or are adjacent to industry, urban or other land use services. This situation puts our natural resources at potential ecological risk. Arachnids (especially scorpions, wolf-spiders and some crevice-weaver and orb-weaver spider species) are excellent bioindicators due to their sensitivity to the environment and the ease of monitoring.

As experts in diversity and taxonomy of the arachnofauna of the eastern Levant, We are currently investigating, and give consultancy in many national arachnid monitoring schemes and research projects. We are also serving as the specialist responsible for Arachnida in the project of the Israel National Red List for Invertebrates. We currently study the effects of two ecological disasters on the local arachnid diversity (‘Avrona oil-spill, Ashalim acid-spill, INPA and HaMAARAG grants to study the effects of ecological disasters on biodiversity).

Several papers and reports were published by Efrat Gavish-Regev and collaborators as a result of these projects, all material collected in these projects was deposited at the National Arachnid Collection, and the Insect collection at NNHC, HUJ.

2. Gavish-Regev E.PI, Armiach Steinpress I.S, Salman I.N.A. S, Segev N.S, Uzan A.T, Byun Y.S, Levy T.S, Aharon S.S, Zvik Y.S, Shtuhin R.S, Shapira Y.S, Majer M.C, Ganem Z.S, Zonstein S.C, Magalhaes I.L.F.C, Lubin Y.PI. 2022. Five-Year Monitoring of a Desert Burrow-Dwelling Spider Following an Environmental Disaster Indicates Long-Term Impacts. Insects, 13, 101 (26 pp.). doi: 10.3390/insects13010101. 

1. Segev N., Gavish-Regev E., and Berger-Tal O., 2020. Sit-and-wait prey: first field observations of scorpions preying on antlions (Neuroptera). Israel Journal of Ecology and Evolution, 57–62. doi:10.1163/22244662-20191057