Eleanor (Ellie) Diamant
“These are relationships I will be able to take with me later that will hopefully lead to long term research collaborations.”
As a kid growing up in California, Ellie Diamant wanted to work with animals. An undergraduate course in Political Ecology at UCLA led her to consider conservation and social processes and the evolution of cities. As a doctoral student, a study on birds in the Negev desert piqued her interest when she heard Israeli professor Oded Berger-Tal’s presentation at an environmental conference in Sweden. Ellie would eventually visit him at Ben-Gurion University, where she had the chance to observe the desert setting for the novel animal-tracking system researchers were using to monitor the birds. While she hadn’t initially considered moving to Israel for her postdoc, Ellie was extremely attracted by the research and the desert environment and found that she couldn’t conduct the study she was interested in outside of Israel.
“The Negev desert felt like a very special place. It is unique – people are drawn to it from all over, as I was.”
As a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist, Ellie studies the interaction between human-caused environmental change and wildlife response, particularly birds in the built environment. For her postdoc at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, she is working in collaboration with Prof. Uri Roll and Prof. Oded Berger-Tal on how the built environment affects species interactions and behavior.
The past year has been filled with challenges and uncertainty. When the option to work in the Negev desert was limited by war, Ellie left Israel for a few months and focused her efforts on another project, which has since led to a number of significant presentations. She is very proud of that work, particularly the symposium she organized with fellow Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar Krista Oswald on Urban Ecology, held at the Israeli Zoological Society in Raanana. Over the summer, Ellie presented “The Importance of Biome in Shaping Urban Biodiversity: The Case of Urban Drylands”, at the European Congress for Conservation Biology in Bologna, Italy. Many Israeli scientists were at the prestigious conference, and all were well-received, as “conservation crosses borders and boundaries.”
Ellie currently spends much of her time in the Midreshet Ben Gurion area of the desert, where she uses the ATLAS tracking system to test interactions between two desert species: the Tristram Starling, found south of Beersheva, and Mynas, an aggressive species native to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, that has grown within Israel. She focuses on the relative impact of habitat change, competition, and human disturbance on the birds. By studying how bird populations respond to human-caused environmental change, Ellie hopes to develop a framework for how biomes interact with urban biodiversity patterns.
Most of all, Ellis is enjoying her time in nature and explains that one of the benefits of fieldwork is that “it can be very healing.” Uncertainty, she explains, can affect us mentally and can also affect the research, even the birds she is studying.
Ellie is very grateful to the Zuckerman STEM Program for funding her research and notes her friendship and collaboration with fellow postdoc scholar Krista Oswald, who share a research field. She looks forward to meeting more program participants in the coming year.
“These are relationships I will be able to take with me later that will hopefully lead to long term research collaborations.”
