Professor Awarded Grant for Book on Western Atlantic Snappers
MELBOURNE, FLA.—Ken Lindeman, a research professor in the Florida Institute of Technology Department of Marine and Environmental Systems, College of Engineering, has earned a $20,000 foundation grant to complete a book surveying all research on the 19 species of snappers from North Carolina to Brazil.
The grant, from the Louisiana State University Foundation, includes funding from the Louisiana Sea Grant Program, the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium and the American Fisheries Society. The support funds completion of a long-term project by a collaborative research team from Cuba, Florida and Louisiana.
The snapper family includes some of the most commercially important fishes in the Western Atlantic. Many of these species play major economic, cultural and ecological roles. The book integrates all primary published and unpublished biological information, using Spanish, English, Portuguese, Dutch and French literature.
The project team of researchers Rodolfo Claro, Lindeman, and Jim Cowan has approximately 90 years of collective snapper research and management experience. Claro and Lindeman previously co-edited the Smithsonian Institution Press book, Ecology of the Marine Fishes of Cuba. Cowan recently co-edited a book on the red snapper published by the American Fisheries Society.
A comprehensive geographic examination of the snappers and sustainable management options does not exist. Each species will be covered in sections on spawning, larval dispersal, post-settlement ecology, juvenile habitat use, adult use of space and prey, physical disturbances, geographic variability, and management challenges and responses.
“Science-based management of these complex and important resources has proved difficult to sustain in many regions,” said Lindeman. “Many species are subject to either elaborate or no management standards, and management will become even more complex with coastal climate change. Comprehensive information assembly will inform management actions that work for the fishes and the anglers.”
