Insufficient understanding of benthic impacts of trawling is due to methodological deficiencies - A reply to Gray et al. (2006)

摘要

The impacts of towed fishing gears on benthic habitats and species have been investigated in a large number of studies. However, individual empirical studies that are designed to test the effects of trawling have yielded inconsistent findings (Kaiser et al., 2006). The ICES Advisory Committee on Ecosystems concludes that the scientific information presently available is not adequate to evaluate the impact of current fishing practices on sensitive habitats (ICES, 2002), and Kaiser et al. (2006) state that reviews of the available literature are open to interpretation and distortion by user groups. As a result, the conclusions drawn from these studies are highly contradictory. On the one hand, Kaiser et al. (2000a) stated that it would be difficult to date to attribute benthic community changes to fishing effort at a spatial scale that is representative of commercial fishing activities. On the other, Watling and Norse (1998) suggested that trawling disrupts the structure of benthic habitats from high latitudes to the tropics in ever-deeper waters and that it represents the greatest anthropogenic threats to the marine environment.