Trophic mechanisms underlying bentho-demersal community recovery in the north-east Atlantic

1. Bottom trawling is considered one of the greatest and most widespread causes of anthropogenic change in shelf seas, with major and prolonged impacts in areas with a long history of exploitation by fisheries such as the North-Atlantic. Here, signs of recovery following the put into force of regulations are increasingly being reported.
2. We examined the extent to which biological diversity and functionality are restored when fishing pressure is reduced by evaluating changes in species biomass and that of the main functional groups present in the continental platform, as obtained from systematic survey (IBTS) results. Moreover, we examined how this recovery is mirrored in the trophic organization of the affected communities by assessing variations in link density and strength of the main consumer species and investigating whether variations in species richness were paralleled by changes in network properties. Finally, we investigated whether reductions in fishing pressure (fishing mor...