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Danielle Amy

David Lerner seeks soil for his common garden research. A rainy winter season resulted in a lush bloom.

A magnifying glass reveals insect eggs on an infected pine.

Ecologist Anat Eidelman examines an infected pine tree with a magnifying glass in the research station of Yatir Forest.

Equipment placed on branches of a pine tree in the Yatir Forest monitors the foliage on the tree and in the canopy.

Rafat Qubaja, a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann institute, in Wadi al-Qaf, the largest nature reserve and protected forest in the West Bank. Qubaja tracks how much carbon trees store. Born and raised in the nearby village of Tarqumiya, part of the forest land is owned by his family, which tries to maintain and protect the forest from litter. The first Palestinian scientist to work at the institute has opened the doors to other Palestinian scholars.

Sheep graze in Yatir Forest, part of a program that lets herds graze in order to reduce fires.

Lerner by a planted acacia tree in the Negev Desert. The Negev is the oldest undisturbed surface on Earth, exposed to the elements for about 1.8 million years. It covers more than half of Israel. Vegetation in the Negev is sparse, but acacias thrive there.

Seeds hang from an acacia tree.

David Lerner, a Ph.D. candidate at Weizmann's Tree Lab, heads for acacia trees in the Arava Desert, Israel. In a three-year study, researchers tracked 10 acacia trees from two species that grow in the Arava to determine if the trees actually grow or only survive and remain the same size.

The Yatir forest explodes into full bloom.