Pelican Island Audubon’s September 16, 2019 meeting at the Vero Beach Community Center, 2266 14th Avenue starting at 7:00 PM, features Ken Lindeman, Ph.D., discussing Changing Climate, Changing Fisheries: Florida and the Caribbean. This meeting is free and the public is invited to attend. Dr. Lindeman is a professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, which is working to discover and apply multidisciplinary findings to advance sustainable coastal policies focusing on the management of coastal lands, fisheries, and habitats affected by human-induced disturbances including climate change. To sustain coastal economies and ecosystems, the work typically focuses on conservation planning for nearshore habitats, marine protected areas, and sea level rise adaptation.
Dr. Lindeman’s Monday, September 16, 2019 talk for Pelican Island Audubon will focus on the effects of a changing climate and fisheries in the Southeast U.S. and Greater Caribbean. The increasing local and regional ocean heating has diverse cascading effects that include: shifts of some fisheries to the north, increased potential for algal blooms, physiological stresses on fishes, mangroves, and seagrasses that can modify reproduction and other ecological processes, and the loss of coral habitats to bleaching events. Ocean acidification is also changing the larval development processes of fishes and the prey they depend on. Other challenges are also present, yet, we are in the early stages of understanding what these processes mean for the future. This presentation will cover the basics of:
- Oceans and climate change
- What we know about impacts on Florida and Caribbean fisheries
- What the science suggests we will see in coming decades
- What we can do in response
Dr. Ken Lindeman manages Florida Tech’s Sustainability Program, now entering year ten with over 130 graduates. Since the early 1980s, he has merged science and policy to advance the conservation of coastal habitats and fisheries. This is reflected in 70 research publications in 20 differing science and policy journals supporting science-based conservation actions in four U.S. states and several Latin American countries. He started his first non-profit in Jupiter in 1989 and has lived in three IRL counties. He has co-authored books by the Smithsonian Inst. Press, Karlsruhe Scientific Publishers, and Duke Univ. Press.