ISRAEL JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION, Vol. 55, 2009, pp. 263–279 DOI: 10.1560/IJEE.55.3.263 *Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: uroll@post.tau.ac.il Received 6 July 2009, accepted 15 September 2009. Uri Roll is a Ph.D. student in Lewi Stone’s lab in the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University. He is interested in the parallel ields of spatial ecology and spatial epidemiology, and their respective application to conservation biology and public health. He is currently working on analysis of species distribution patterns on a large scale. The portion of his work pesented here, in which he questions traditional thinking about Israel's biodiversity, earned him the annual Naomi Bouskila Award for best student paper published in the Israel Journal of Ecology & Evolution. Hot-spot facts and artifacts— questioning israel’s great biodiversity URI ROLL, a, * LEwI STONE, a AND SHAI MEIRI b a Biomathematics Unit, Department of Zoology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel b Department of Zoology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel ABSTRACT Israel’s biological diversity has been praised as being particularly rich in rela- tion to its size; however this assumption was never tested when taking into account the empirical form of the species–area relationship. Here we com- pared the species richness of different countries to see if the Israeli diversity is exceptionally rich when area is accurately accounted for. we compared richness of amphibians, birds, mammals, reptiles, lowering plants, conifers and cycads, and ferns in all the world’s countries. we further tested the ef- fects of mean latitude, altitude span, and insularity on species richness both for all world countries and just for Mediterranean countries. For all taxa and in all tests, Israel lies within the prediction intervals of the models. Out of 42 tests, Israel’s residuals lie in the upper decile of positive residuals once: for reptiles, when compared to all world countries, taking all predicting factors into account. Using only countries larger than 1000 km 2 , Israel was placed as top residual when compared to other Mediterranean countries for mammals and reptiles. we therefore conclude that Israel’s species richness does not sig- niicantly exceed the expected values for a country its size. This is true when comparing it to either world or just Mediterranean countries. Adding more predicting factors does not change this fact. Keywords: Biodiversity, diversity, Israel, Mediterranean, species–area rela- tionship INTRODUCTION Identifying regions that hold high biological diversity is extremely important in con- servation biology planning (Myers, 1988; Reid, 1998). Once such regions are identi- ied, they can be better protected. However, despite a large body of work on this topic there are still many discrepancies between different researchers on the best methods to