Tag Archives: Impacts of Trawling
The Impacts of Trawling in the North Sea are Overrated
A new study by Ferdinand Oberle, Curt Storlazzi, and Till Hanebuth attempted to quantify the global impact of bottom trawling on continental shelf. It presents a high-resolution, one-year, spatial record of ground-penetrating fishing activities, namely otter trawling (referred to as bottom-trawling in the paper) on the NW-Iberian shelf, and calculates the resuspended sediment load caused by the operations of this fleet. The authors also challenge conclusions from papers like Kaiser et al 2006 that suggest trawling affected seabed hotspots are rare. To this end the authors found NW Iberian shelf areas to be experiencing trawling on average 5.9 times per annum compared to less than 1 in previous studies. Read the rest here 21:18
