Many people, especially professors, like to talk about saving the natural world. Very very few actually build the institutions and capacity that make saving the planet’s ecological systems possible. Professor Tamar Dayan is one of them.

Last month Tamar stepped down as head of the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University. As a colleague, an admirer, and an intermittent beneficiary of her wisdom – it seems appropriate to pause and briefly describe what she has done for ecological science; for preserving the many creatures with whom we share this land; and for the generations who will inherit this country’s embattled biodiversity.

I have known Tamar for many years. Like everyone in Israel’s environmental community, it did not take long to realize, that when she enters a room, the standards seem to rise. Professor Dayan is before all else, a scientist of international stature. She and her students have conducted innumerable studies in mammalian ecology, describing how competing species divide up the world, how communities of animals assemble and coexist, and how human beings reshape habitats.

Indeed, Tamar Dayan’s research helped resolve a long-standing ecological debate by demonstrating how competition among species can structure animal communities and influence the evolution of body size. Tamar also pioneered the study of time as an ecological resource, showing how differences in daily activity patterns enable species to coexist, an insight with important implications for understanding the effects of human disturbance and light pollution.  It is not surprising that her publications have been cited in over 16,000 scientific articles by ecologists around the globe!

In a word, professor Dayan helped put Israeli ecology on the global scientific map, where its researchers continue to enjoy international stature, far beyond the size of their academic community and the local habitats that they studies. For this she was awarded a life achievement award in 2021 by Israel’s national Society of Ecology and Environmental Sciences.

Tamar could easily have spent a comfortable career cranking out additional publications and accumulating prizes. It is Israel’s good fortune that she wanted more.

That’s because Tamar Dayan never believed that science ends at the laboratory door. For as long as I have known her, she has been a fighter: polite, precise, relentless – not just for scientific excellence but for the rights of the natural world. Conservation organizations, like the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel have long relied on her.  In planning debates, on public committees, in the........

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