Abstract

Bottom trawling grounds have been expanding to deeper areas of the oceans since the mid-XXth century, and mitigating strategies aimed to protect fish stocks, such as temporal trawling closures, have recently been implemented. Here we investigated the biogeochemical properties of sediment from a deep-sea trawling ground in Palamós Canyon (NW Mediterranean) to assess the effects of a 2-months trawling closure in the recovery of sedimentary organic matter. In comparison to untrawled areas, the continuous erosion and sediment mixing in trawling grounds led to coarser reworked sediments impoverished in organic carbon (∼30% loss) and promoted the degradation of labile compounds (52–70% loss). These impacts persisted after the temporal trawling closure, highlighting that this management strategy is insufficient to restore the seafloor. Considering the continuous expansion of bottom trawling grounds, this activity could have significant and irreversible biogeochemical impacts on ocean margins at a global scale, hampering their carbon burial capacity.

RAS ID

36859

Document Type

Letter to the Editor

Date of Publication

2021

Volume

48

Issue

2

Funding Information

Australian Research Council

Funding information : https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL091279

School

School of Science / Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research

Grant Number

ARC Number : LE170100219

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Publisher

Wiley

Identifier

Pere Masqué

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1789-320X

Comments

Paradis, S., Goñi, M., Masqué, R., Durán, R., Arjona-Camas, M., Palanques, A., & Puig, P. (2021). Persistance of biogeochemical alterations of deep-sea sediments by bottom trawling. Geophysical Research Letters, 48(2), Article e2020GL091279.

https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL091279

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

10.1029/2020GL091279