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.
Highlights
Bottom trawling, which is highly detrimental to seabed habitats, has been banned in some jurisdictions to mitigate the problems of habitat destruction and overfishing
Our study provides the much-needed empirical data to show that a trawl ban is an effective management tool to facilitate rapid recovery of inshore benthic ecosystems and associated biodiversity in the tropical coastal waters within a period of 3 years (Fig. 1)
Comparing the 2012 and 2015 surveys shows that the loadings of most of sites have increased along the first principal component, reflecting higher sedimentary total organic matter (TOM), finer particle sizes, as well as lower SUS and turbidity (TUR) after the trawl ban (Fig. 2b; Supplementary Table 2)
Summary
Bottom trawling, which is highly detrimental to seabed habitats, has been banned in some jurisdictions to mitigate the problems of habitat destruction and overfishing. Our study provides the much-needed empirical data to show that a trawl ban is an effective management tool to facilitate rapid recovery of inshore benthic ecosystems (i.e. higher organic contents in sediment and lower suspended-solid loads in water column) and associated biodiversity (i.e. increased abundance, species richness, functional diversity and among-site similarity of macrobenthos) in the tropical coastal waters within a period of 3 years (Fig. 1).
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