Journal
JOURNAL OF MARINE SYSTEMS
Volume 159, Issue -, Pages 109-119Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jmarsys.2015.12.007
Keywords
Bottom trawling; Continental shelf; Sediment resuspension; Ecosystem; Iberia
Funding
- DFG Research Center MARUM
- U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Coastal and Marine Geology Program
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Continental shelves worldwide are subject to intense bottom trawling that causes sediment to be resuspended. The widely used traditional concepts of modern sedimentary transport systems on the shelf rely only on estimates for naturally driven sediment resuspension such as through storm waves, bottom currents, and gravity driven flows but they overlook a critical anthropogenic factor. The strong influence of bottom trawling on a source-to-sink sediment budget is explored on the NW Iberian shelf. Use of Automated Information System vessel tracking data provides for a high-resolution vessel track reconstruction and the accurate calculation of the spatial distribution of bottom trawling intensity and associated resuspended sediment load. The mean bottom trawling-induced resuspended sediment mass for the NW Iberian shelf is 13.50 Mt yr(-1), which leads to a sixfold increase in off-shelf sediment transport when compared to natural resuspension mechanisms. The source to-sink budget analysis provides evidence that bottom trawling causes a rapid erosion of the fine sediment on human time scales. Combining global soft sediment distribution data of the shelves with worldwide bottom trawling intensity estimates we show that the bottom trawling-induced resuspended sediment mass amounts to approximately the same mass of all sediment entering the shelves through rivers. Spatial delineations between natural and anthropogenic sediment resuspension areas are presented to aid in marine management questions. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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