Integral assessment of trawling effects in a Mediterranean fishing ground: changes in benthic functional components and consequences for target species

Abstract

Long-term changes in the fishing effort regime may affect both commercial target species and the functionality of benthic ecosystems. This study focuses on changes in benthic infaunal community from a Mediterranean fishing ground that is characterised by a well-defined trawl fleet dynamics tightly related with the main target species in the area: Mullus barbatus. Results suggest that,despite chronic trawling clearly modified the infauna community structure, changes linked to variability in the effort regime over the year are too little to influence M. barbatus population at the within-year time scale