Bottom trawling has widespread impacts on benthic communities and habitats. While the direct impacts of trawl disturbances on benthic communities have been extensively studied, the consequences from long‐term chronic disturbances are less well understood. The response of benthic macrofauna to chronic otter‐trawl disturbance from a Nephrops norvegicus (Norway lobster) fishery was investigated along a gradient of fishing intensity over a muddy fishing ground in the northeastern Irish Sea. Chronic otter trawling had a significant, negative effect on benthic infauna abundance, biomass, and species richness. Benthic epifauna abundance and species richness also showed a significant, negative response, while no such effect was evident for epibenthic biomass. Furthermore, chronic trawl disturbance led to clear changes in community composition of benthic infauna and epifauna. The results presented indicate that otter‐trawl impacts are cumulative and can lead to profound changes in benthic communities, which may have far‐reaching implications for the integrity of marine food webs. Studies investigating the short‐term effects of fishing manipulations previously concluded that otter trawling on muddy substrates had only modest effects on the benthic biota. Hence, the results presented by this study highlight that data from experimental studies can not be readily extrapolated to an ecosystem level and that subtle cumulative effects may only become apparent when fishing disturbances are examined over larger spatial and temporal scales. Furthermore, this study shows that data on chronic effects of bottom trawling on the benthos will be vital in informing the recently advocated move toward an ecosystem approach in fisheries management. As bottom‐trawl fisheries are expanding into ever deeper muddy habitats, the results presented here are an important step toward understanding the global ecosystem effects of bottom trawling.

The structure of North Sea benthic invertebrate and fish communities is an important indicator of anthropogenic and environmental impacts. Although N

Lambert, G. I., Hiddink, J. G., Hintzen, N. T., Hinz, H., Kaiser, M. J., Murray, L. G., and Jennings, S. 2012. Implications of using alternative methods of vessel monitoring system (VMS) data analysis to describe fishing activities and impacts. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 69: 682–693. Understanding the spatial distribution and intensity of fishing activity is a prerequisite for estimating fishing impacts on seabed biota and habitats. Vessel monitoring system data provide information on fishing activity at large spatial scales. However, successive position records can be too infrequent to describe the complex movements fishing vessels make. High-frequency position data were collected to evaluate how polling frequency and the method of analysis influenced the estimates of fishing impact on the seabed and associated epifaunal communities. Comparisons of known positions with predictions from track interpolation revealed that the performance of interpolation depended on fleet behaviour. Descriptions and indicators of fishing intensity were influenced significantly by the analytical methods (track reconstruction, density of position records) and grid-cell resolution used for the analysis. These factors can lead to an underestimation of fishing impact on epifaunal communities. It is necessary to correct for such errors to quantify the effects of fishing on various ecosystem components and hence to inform ecosystem-based management. Polling at intervals of 30 min would provide a desirable compromise between achieving precise estimates of fishing impacts on the seabed and minimizing the cost of data collection and handling.