A Birder’s Guide to Bird Migration in Indian River County
Hosted by Juanita Baker, author of “Florida Birds Exposed”, this September 10, 2020 Zoom webinar features Julian Grudens and Will Johnson describing strategies for observing bird migration in Indian River County, Florida.
Changing Climate, Changing Fisheries with Dr. Ken Lindeman
Pelican Island Audubon’s September 16, 2019 meeting at the Vero Beach Community Center featured Ken Lindeman, Ph.D., discussing Changing Climate, Changing Fisheries: Florida and the Caribbean. 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 talk focuses 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.
