ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Chronic and intensive bottom trawling impairs deep-sea biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Assessing the success of marine ecosystem restoration using meta-analysis.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Changes in bacterial community composition and antibiotic resistance profiles of coral-associated microbiota in the vicinity of Chilean salmon farms.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Challenges in expert ratings of marine habitat and species sensitivity to anthropogenic pressures.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Tracking bottom-fishing activities in protected vulnerable marine ecosystem areas and below 800-m depth in European Union waters.Science advances · 2025Article
- Biodiversity monitoring in bamboo coral assemblages in the North Aegean Sea, eastern Mediterranean Basin.Biodiversity data journal · 2025Article
- Erosion of fish trophic position: an indirect effect of fishing on food webs elucidated by stable isotopes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Occurrence of SeahorsesAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Mapping the habitat refugia of Isidella elongata under climate change and trawling impacts to preserve Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems in the Mediterranean.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Trapped DNA fragments in marine sponge specimens unveil North Atlantic deep-sea fish diversity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Marine conservation palaeobiology: What does the late Quaternary fossil record tell us about modern-day extinctions and biodiversity threats?Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- The influence of mussel restoration on coastal carbon cycling.Global change biology · 2022Article
- Article
- The impact of mobile demersal fishing on carbon storage in seabed sediments.Global change biology · 2022Review
- Influence of salinity on the meiofaunal distribution in a hypersaline lake along the southeast coast of India.Environmental monitoring and assessment · 2022Article
- Patterns of eukaryotic diversity from the surface to the deep-ocean sediment.Science advances · 2022Article
- Commercial fishery disturbance of the global ocean biological carbon sink.Global change biology · 2022Article
- COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown: An Excellent Opportunity to Study the Effects of Trawling Disturbance on Macrobenthic Fauna in the Shallow Waters of the Gulf of Gabès (Tunisia, Central Mediterranean Sea).International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Assessing discards in an illegal small-scale fishery using fisher-led reporting.Reviews in fish biology and fisheries · 2022Article
- Scientific progress made towards bridging the knowledge gap in the biology of Mediterranean marine fishes.PloS one · 2022Article
- Non-biodegradable objects may boost microbial growth in water bodies by harnessing bubbles.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
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7 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 the first half of the 20th century now increasing. We show here that compared with untrawled areas, chronically trawled sediments along the continental slope of the north-western Mediterranean Sea are characterized by significant decreases in organic matter content (up to 52%), slower organic carbon turnover (ca. 37%), and reduced meiofauna abundance (80%), biodiversity (50%), and nematode species richness (25%). We estimate that the organic carbon removed daily by trawling in the region under scrutiny represents as much as 60-100% of the input flux. We anticipate that such an impact is causing the degradation of deep-sea sedimentary habitats and an infaunal depauperation. With deep-sea trawling currently conducted along most continental margins, we conclude that trawling represents a major threat to the deep seafloor ecosystem at the global scale.
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