Document of bibliographic reference 339554

BibliographicReference record

Type

Bibliographic resource

Type of document

Journal article

BibLvlCode

AS

Title

Recovery of tropical marine benthos after a trawl ban demonstrates linkage between abiotic and biotic changes

Abstract

Bottom trawling, which is highly detrimental to seabed habitats, has been banned in some jurisdictions to mitigate the problems of habitat destruction and overfishing. However, most reports of ecosystem responses to trawling impacts originate from temperate latitudes, focusing on commercial species, and recovery of invertebrate macrobenthos from trawl ban has hardly ever been studied in the tropics. In Hong Kong (lat. 22.4°N), a history of intensive trawling with various types of gears has long degraded coastal ecosystems. To facilitate the recovery of fisheries resources and associated benthic ecosystems, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region implemented a territory-wide trawl ban on December 31, 2012. Comparison of surveys conducted in June 2012 (before the trawl ban) and June 2015 (2.5 years after the ban) revealed higher organic contents in sediment and lower suspended-solid loads in water column, as well as a significant increase in site-based abundance, species richness, functional diversity and among-site similarity of macrobenthos after the trawl ban. Our results suggest that the imposition of a trawl ban can be an effective measure for biodiversity conservation in tropical coastal waters.

WebOfScience code

https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:000620961500003

Bibliographic citation

Wang, Z.; Leung, K.M.Y.; Sung, Y.H.; Dudgeon, D.; Qiu, J.-W. (2021). Recovery of tropical marine benthos after a trawl ban demonstrates linkage between abiotic and biotic changes. Communications Biology 4(1): 212. https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-01732-y

Topic

Marine

Is peer reviewed

true

Access rights

open access

Is accessible for free

true