Benthic Habitats and the Effects of Fishing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<em><strong>Abstract. </strong></em>This study assessed the effects of disturbance to benthic communities and the rate of recovery in an area closed to bottom fishing. The study site was the gravel sediment habitat on the northern edge of Georges Bank, which is an important fishing ground and a nursery area for juvenile fish. On eight cruises to this area from 1994 to 2000, we collected dredge samples and photographs from sites of varying depths and with varying degrees of disturbance from otter trawling and scallop dredging. We assessed the megafaunal communities at two adjacent sites in Canadian waters, one heavily fished and the other only lightly trawled. The lightly trawled site (84-m water depth) had significantly higher numerical abundance and biomass of benthic megafauna than did the heavily fished site. There were also marked differences in community composition between the two sites: the undisturbed site was characterized by fragile species— shrimps, polychaetes, and brittle stars—that live in the complex habitat provided by colonial epifauna, which is not present at the disturbed site (80 m). We also monitored the recovery of a previously disturbed shallow area (47 m) that was closed to bottom fishing in January 1995. In the closed area (Closed Area II), we observed significant shifts in species composition and significant increases in abundance (4×), biomass (18×), production (4×), and epifaunal cover. Among the taxa that have increased are species of crabs, molluscs, polychaetes, and echinoderms. Species-dominance curves reversed following the closure, with species abundance progressively decreasing and species biomass progressively increasing, as large animals came to dominate the biomass. Results of this and prior studies have been used by the New England Fishery Management Council to designate and maintain a Habitat Area of Particular Concern for juvenile Atlantic cod <em>Gadus morhua</em>.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".