The relative effects of bottom trawling, organic enrichment, and natural environmental factors on coastal seabed communities.

Coastal regions are under intense and growing pressure from human activities. Here, we examine how human and natural drivers interact with benthic communities, species, and life-history traits across four distinct coastal areas. Sediment organic content was a key driver of seabed community characteristics, with positive (increased benthic biomass) and strongly adverse (depauperate communities) effects observed.

Complementarity and sensitivity of benthic state indicators to bottom-trawl fishing disturbance.

Many indicators have been developed to assess the state of benthic communities and identify seabed habitats most at risk from bottom trawling disturbance. However, the large variety of indicators and their development and application under specific geographic areas and management contexts has made it difficult to evaluate their wider utility. We compared the complementarity/uniqueness, sensitivity, and selectivity of 18 benthic indicators to pressure of bottom trawling.

Improving seabed substrate mapping with high-resolution bottom trawl data.

Accurate seabed substrate maps are essential for marine management, as substrate is an important component of the habitat type and used as a proxy for the prevailing benthic community. The provision of substrate maps, however, is hampered by the excessive costs of at-sea observations and, consequently, the uncertainty associated with spatial models used to interpolate these observations to full-coverage maps. Here, we tested whether high-resolution distributions of bottom trawling activity, readily collected under EU law, could improve the accuracy of substrate interpolations.

European coastal monitoring programmes may fail to identify impacts on benthic macrofauna caused by bottom trawling.

Bottom trawling (hereafter trawling) is the dominant human pressure impacting continental shelves globally. However, due to ongoing data deficiencies for smaller coastal vessels, the effects of trawling on nearshore seabed ecosystems are poorly understood. In Europe, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) provides a framework for the protection and improvement of coastal water bodies.

Developing benthic monitoring programmes to support precise and representative status assessments: a case study from the Baltic Sea.

Benthic habitats and communities are key components of the marine ecosystem. Securing their functioning is a central aim in marine environmental management, where monitoring data provide the base for assessing the state of marine ecosystems. In the Baltic Sea, a > 50-year-long tradition of zoobenthic monitoring exists.