Long-term recovery of trawled marine communities 25 years after the world’s largest adaptive management experiment

Understanding the effects of trawling on seabed habitats is a major issue in Australia and internationally and is a major concern re trawl sustainability. These perceptions negatively affect the social licence of fisheries. Consequently, initiatives have been undertaken applying methods developed to quantify effects of trawling in the Great Barrier Reef and a worldwide synthesis of existing approaches including the Australian experience. Nevertheless, the scarcity of information on recovery of habitats is a serious impediment to management, particularly for sensitive habitat forming biota (vulnerable marine ecosystems, VMEs). This project will determine the rates of recovery of VMEs by comparing areas of contrasting trawl effort since the 1970s and will use as a benchmark, measurements made of benthic habitat forming biota and their associated fish assemblages from the 1980s and 1990s.