Moshe Shachak

TL;DR: The role that many organisms play in the creation, modification and maintenance of habitats does not involve direct trophic interactions between species, but they are nevertheless important and common.

TL;DR: It is argued that engineering has both negative and positive effects on species richness and abundances at small scales, but the net effects are probably positive at larger scales encompassing engineered and nonengineered environments in ecological and evolutionary space and time.

TL;DR: A new model for vegetation patterns is introduced that predicts transitions from bare soil at low precipitation to homogeneous vegetation at high precipitation, through intermediate states of spot, stripe, and hole patterns and predicts wide precipitation ranges where different stable states coexist.

TL;DR: A mathematical model is developed for a pair of ecosystem engineers commonly found in drylands: plants forming vegetation patterns and cyanobacteria forming soil crusts that highlights conditions for habitat creation and for high habitat richness, and suggests a novel mechanism for species loss events as a result of environmental changes.

TL;DR: In this article, the role of soil crusts in infiltration processes in three contrasting environments in the Northern, Central, and Central-Western Negev, Israel was examined, and it was shown that removal of a thin cyanobacterial-dominant crust from a sandy dune at Nizzana in the Central-western Negesv and of a well-developed lichendominant and a cyanobacteriadominant soil from a loess-covered hillslope at Sayeret Shaked in the northern Negesa resulted in three to fivefold increases in sorpt