This semester was one of the most challenging that I have ever experienced. Added to the effects of the pandemic that were still all around us was the security and political situation that came to a boiling point. I sincerely hope that the next academic year will be more peaceful and that we can concentrate on research and teaching with all our might.
The University Board of Directors recently visited the Sede Boqer Campus. They were also joined in their visit by the senior management of the university. The tour of the FAAB was dedicated to visiting the research vineyard where we presented the goals of our institute. The visitors met with several researchers and students from the institute, and we were able to demonstrate measuring instruments to them, as well as enjoy together fine wine and olive oil, produced from our experimental fields. The feedback from the board was very positive, and in my opinion, this visit will strengthen our ties with the university management.
The establishment of the School of Sustainability and Climate Change was recently announced. I was a partner in the committee that wrote the school's bylaws, which is basically a new BGU framework that combines all the six faculties. I sincerely hope that the institute's researchers will be integrated into the school, and with the help of the school, the barriers will be lowered and collaboration with the other faculties at the university will increase. The research we conduct in the fields of agriculture and the environment can certainly expand to other fields, such as health, management and even archeology.
The 31st Symposium in Memory of Even- Ari will be held on June 23rd, and this year, all lectures will be related to the interesting activities taking place at the institute's research farms (the Avdat and Wadi Mashash farms). Thank you to Nurit and Arnon for organizing the conference and for broadcasting these activities. I expect that the level of activity at the farm will increase and that more researchers and students will join the excellent cutting-edge research that is already being conducted at our research farms.
Biophysical Ecology in the Namib Desert – Course and Field Workshop
In the past several years, a unique course has been offered to AKIS’s graduate students, aimed at exposing students to micrometeorological variables that affect animals and plants in the environments in which they live, as well as learning how to measure them and analyze their effects. The course is composed of two elements:
1) Acquiring a background in physiological ecology.
2) A 16-day-long field workshop at the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre, Namibia, where AKIS students are joined by students from the US, Namibia, and South Africa.
This year, 14 out of 35 M.Sc. graduates were from our institute.
Congratulations to our graduates:
Thi Thuc Nguyen (summa cum laude), Nick Duppen (cum laude), Sophie Obersteiner (cum laude), Inbal Ronay (cum laude), Zahar Adamov, Junyi He, Yasmin Levi, Noam Meislish, Daniel Minikaev, Nway Oo Htet, Alon Schlisser, and Isaac Yagle
Here are some photos from the graduation ceremony:
BIDR first virtual Open Day for Chinese students
The Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research (BIDR) successfully launched its first virtual Open Day for Chinese students on Friday, April 9, 2021. More than 700 students participated in this event, making it the most significant
online Open Day this year.
The Open Day was hosted by Prof. Naftali Lazarovitch and Chinese student ambassadors. Opening greetings were given by Prof. Noam Weisbrod (Director of the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research) and Prof. Ali Nejidat (Head of the
Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies). These were followed by a virtual tour of the Sede Boqer Campus, and then by video introductions to the French Associates Institute for Agriculture and Biotechnology of Drylands,
the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, and the Swiss Institute for Dryland Environmental and Energy Research, given by Prof. Simon Barak, Dr. Edo Bar-Zeev, and Prof. Iris Visoly-Fisher, respectively. Presentations covered various
topics including study programs, campus living, the admissions process, and scholarship information. After the presentations, audience members were allowed to ask the professors and the Chinese student ambassadors questions directly.
"This Open Day enables us to attract smart and hard-working Chinese students from leading universities while making new connections and allowing more people in China to learn about what we are doing and what it's like to study here,"
said Prof. Naftali Lazarovitch, the Open Day organizer.
This Open Day event was co-organized by five Chinese student ambassadors: Ji Qin, Kaining Zhou, Lingling Wen, Wei Zhang, and Yang Yang. They made a great effort to make this Open Day informative and well-advertised in China. Due to the success
of this event, there was a second Open Day on May 5, 2021
This is the link to the recorded video of the first Open Day
Congratulations to Dr. Amnon cochavi on his new position
Dr. Amnon Cochavi a graduate of the FAAB, who was supervised by Prof. Yoni Ephrath and Prof. Shimon Rachmilevitch, accepted a researcher position at the Agricultural Research Organization (Volcani Center) at Newe Yaar where he will study of the physiology of Cucurbitaceae.
Wine research initiatives
On June 8, 2021, the second Symposium of the Wine Institute was held at Ariel University, organized by Ishay Netzer and Eliashiv Drori. The event was attended by Prof. Aaron Fait, who lectured on grapevine cluster defense, a work carried out with MSc student Yaara Zohar, in collaboration with Teperberg Wineries, aimed at improving the crop quality of white wine in the Miztpe Ramon area. This was the last of an ongoing series of meetings, which started years ago at the BIDR and included biannual meetings on the Sede Boqer and Ariel campuses. At the BIDR, the symposium involved Italian, Israeli, and other international scientists, sharing the latest news on viticulture research. The event at Ariel brought together representatives from industry and the academy. The initiatives shared at these meetings are shaping the development of wine grapevine viticulture in Israel, fostering research on the fundamental questions regarding fruit quality, metabolism and the role of the environment in crop quality. During the last event, the meetings were described as historic and mind-bending by a winemaker from a large Israeli winery.
Upcoming Events
The 31st prof. Michael Even-Ari symposium: Toward sustainable human-nature interactions in deserts
23 June 2021 Evans Auditorium Sede-Boqer campus Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
A new project entitled "Unraveling the biogeochemical mechanisms of drought and rewetting-induced nitric and nitrous oxide emissions from dryland agriculture" was recently funded by BARD.
This project is a collaboration between Ilya Gelfand (BGU) and Debasish Saha, Sean Schaeffer, and Jagadamma Sindhu (University of Tennessee, USA). The main aim of the project is to understand what happens with soil N and C cycles under different drought and rain regimes.
This work has three main goals: 1) to quantify temporal N2O and NO emissions in response to seasonal distributions of drought and rewetting; 2) to identify microbial processes contributing to N2O fluxes from soils of different textures exposed to different drought durations and rewetting intensities; and 3) to compare the DayCent biogeochemical model and a data-driven machine learning model in predicting drought and rewetting-induced N oxide emissions.
The field work will be performed at the Sede Boqer Campus, while laboratory-based incubations with soil from Israel will be done at the University of Tennessee.
Budget: 310,000 USD for three years.
The Daniel E. Koshland Fund to Support Interdisciplinary Research at the BIDR
Shimon Rachmilevitch and Uri Roll (SIDEER): Socio-economic drivers and ecological impacts of urban transformation on dryland agricultural expansion across scales
Gilboa Arye and Avner Ronen (ZIWR): Fate and transport of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in the agricultural soils of the Negev Desert
Vered Tzin, Aaron Fait, and Michal Segoli (SIDEER): Wine grapevine plant defense: a vine-pest study to identify the causes of yield loss in the Negev
Nurit Agam and Merav Seifan (SIDEER): Does the Rose of Jericho harvest dew and/or fog?
DFG grant
The team:
Tobias Köllner from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology (Jena)
Assaf Distelfeld from the Department of Evolutionary and Environmental Biology, University of Haifa
Plants in nature are continuously challenged by diverse insect herbivores, and, in response, produce constitutive and inducible defenses to reduce insect damage and preserve their own fitness. Nevertheless, insect herbivory often causes severe damage to plants, resulting in significant losses in crop yield. Furthermore, the gradual increase in global temperatures has promoted the expansion of pest populations to new regions and increased their reproduction rate. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to rigorously explore natural plant defense mechanisms and traits to discover additional modes of resistance that could be deployed against cereal aphids, caterpillars, and other pests. In our new DFG (German Research Foundation)-Middle East Collaboration project, we will combine multiple approaches to discover the formation and regulation of the major defense compounds in wheat.
The Kessel salinity center for agricultural biology scholarships
In addition, Prof. Aaron Fait received a research grant award for his study on salinity in tomatoes.
Short Term Scientific Mission
Ibrahim Salman, a PhD student working in Vered Tzin and Merav Seifan’s labs (MDDE, BIDR, BGU), was awarded a Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) grant from COST Action to travel to the Institute of Botany, Prague, Czech Republic
The two-spotted spider mite (TSSM) is a ubiquitous pest that has a major economic impact on the tomato industry. Tomato plants have evolved broad defense mechanisms regulated by the expression of defense genes, hormones, and secondary metabolites present
constitutively or induced upon infestation. Although tomato defense mechanisms have been studied for three decades, only a few studies have compared the natural mite resistance between domesticated cultivars at the molecular level. The main goal of
our research was to reveal the molecular differences between two tomatoes with contrasting TSSM susceptibility. To address this, first, we assessed the relative TSSM susceptibility of two cluster cherry tomato cultivars in net house conditions and
determined the mite population size and their damage to plants. Second, the performance and oviposition of TSSMs were evaluated on whole plants and intact tomato leaves, respectively. Third, we used gene expression analysis to assess which biosynthetic
and signaling pathways may be involved in these plant defenses, followed by a time point analysis of volatiles. Finally, an olfactory analysis of TSSMs and P. persimilis revealed different volatile blends emitted by plants under naïve or
infested conditions. Three Terpene synthase genes were found to have potential value as TSSM resistance genes for breeding new resistant varieties. The results obtained in this study provide useful data for improving volatile content in the
tomato, which can be adjusted to a comprehensive pest management program for the TSSM in tomato fields and net houses.
This project was conducted in collaboration with the Southern R&D MOP-Darom team
This research was funded by the Israel Ministry of Agriculture, grant 16-38-0029, ICA in Israel, and the Bona Terra Foundation Fund for Promoting Sustainable Agriculture in Drylands
Dr. Yael Raij-Hoffman, former PhD student in Prof. Lazarovitch's lab, presented the following talk at the InterPore conference 2021: "Suction cup system-dependent variable boundary condition: Transient water flow and multi-component
solute transport."
Dr. Thomas Groenveld, former PhD student in Prof. Lazarovitch's lab, presented the following talk at the InterPore conference, 2021: "Numerical modeling to optimize nitrogen fertigation with consideration of transient drought and nitrogen
stress."
פלטפורמת שיווק
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