Direct and indirect effects of a fishing ban on lacustrine fish community do not result in a full recovery

Protected areas are increasingly being promoted as an important means of protecting freshwater biological diversity and ecological processes. A robust assessment of ecological changes in protected areas is fundamental to optimize conservation policies and adaptive management. China's efforts to establish aquatic reserves have attracted worldwide attention, especially the \"10-year fishing ban\" implemented in the Yangtze River basin.
We focused on Liangzi Lake, a freshwater protected area in the Yangtze River basin, to understand the effect of a fishing ban occurring after a short period of overfishing. In this aim, the time series of fish community taxonomic and functional structure encompassing the overfishing period and a post-ban period have been analyzed. Fish community metrics with direct, indirect, and no responses to fishing bans were identified.
The results indicate that in the early period of the fishing ban, the trophic level and body size structure of the fish community were ..., Field surveys were conducted four times a year (April-spring; July-summer; October-autumn; January-winter) from April 2016 to January 2022 for a total of 24 sampling occasions. At each sampling occasion, fish were collected at eight sites along the littoral zone of Liangzi Lake. For each site, we collected fish using two multi-mesh gillnets, one benthic and one pelagic. This standard multi-mesh gillnet measuring 30 m in length and 2.0 m in height (modified from European standard methods, CEN, 2015), has 12 panels (2.5 × 2 m) with respective mesh sizes of 5, 6.25, 8, 10, 12.5, 15.5, 19.5, 24, 30, 35, 43 and 55 mm. The gillnets were set in the afternoon (approx. 18:00) and harvested in the following morning (approx. 6:00) for three days in a row (36 h of sampling in total). All fish collected were individually identified with species (Department of Ichthyology, Institute of Hydrobiology, CAS 1976), counted and weighed at 0.01 g. The scientific names of the 45 species collected (Table S3) ...,