Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Minimizing fishing impacts on seafloor ecosystems is a growing focus of ocean management; however, few quantitative tools exist to guide seascape scale habitat management. To meet these needs, we developed a model to assess benthic ecosystem impacts from fishing gear contact. The habitat impacts model is cast in discrete-time and can accommodate overlapping fisheries as well as incorporate gear-specific contact dynamics. We implemented the model in the North Pacific using fishing data from 2003 – 2017, estimating that habitat in 3.1% of the 1.2 million km2 study area was disturbed at the end of the simulation period. A marked decline in habitat disturbance was evident since 2010 attributable to a single regulatory gear change which lifted trawl gear components off the seafloor. Running scenarios without these gear modifications showed these policies may have contributed to a 24% reduction in habitat disturbance since their implementation. Ultimately, model outputs provide direct estimates of the spatial and temporal trends of habitat effects from fishing – a key component of regulatory policies for many of the world’s fisheries.