Bottom trawling is one of the most disruptive and widespread human-induced physical disturbances to seabed communities and has become a global environmental concern. We used a comparative approach to test the hypothesis that persistent otter trawling decreases bottom habitat complexity and biodiversity, increases the abundance of opportunistic species, and benefits prey important in the diet of...

Bottom trawling has many impacts on marine ecosystems, including seafood stock impoverishment, benthos mortality, and sediment resuspension. Historical records of this fishing practice date back to the mid-1300s. Trawling became a widespread practice in the late 19th century, and it is now progressively expanding to greater depths, with the concerns about its sustainability that emerged during ...

Climate driven range shifts are driving the redistribution of marine species and threatening functioning stability ecosystems. For that structural basis ecosystems, such effects can be magnified into drastic loss ecosystem resilience. Rhodoliths unattached calcareous red algae provide key complex three-dimensional habitats for highly diverse biological communities. These globally distributed bi...

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/srep43332.

A North Sea area characterized by muddy, sandy, and gravelly sediments is surveyed with a single-beam echo sounder operating at 12, 38, and 200 kHz. Closely spaced survey legs and a high repetition rate of five sounder pings per second allow the production of echo energy maps with a high spatial resolution. These energy maps reveal a series of string-like features, which are believed to be due ...

The offshore displacement of commercial bottom trawling has raised concerns about the impact of this destructive fishing practice on the deep seafloor, which is in general characterized by lower resilience than shallow water regions. This study focuses on the flanks of La Fonera (or Palamós) submarine canyon in the Northwestern Mediterranean, where an intensive bottom trawl fishery has been act...

Mapping and quantifying bottom trawling fishing pressure on the seafloor is pivotal to understand its effects on deep-sea benthic habitats. Using data from the Vessel Monitoring System of crustacean trawlers along the Portuguese margin, we have identified the most exploited areas and characterized the most targeted habitats and water depths. We estimated a total trawling effort of 69596, 66766,...