Abstract
Area closures allow a scallop population and associated habitat to recover from the effects of fishing. Determining the duration of rotational management closures for the Atlantic Sea Scallop (Placopecten magellanicus) fishery requires information on both the recovery of scallop populations for subsequent extraction and the resiliency of marine benthic ecosystems for conservation objectives. I had a unique opportunity to conduct a control-impact environmental study using an area that has been closed to fishing for over 20 years and an area continually impacted by fishing to examine the effects of scallop fishing on the benthic communities of the Northern Edge of Georges Bank. Substrate composition, faunal density, and taxonomic richness data were collected using drop camera surveys. These areas have similar substrate compositions, mostly cobble and gravel. Sediment in the control area shifted to larger particle sizes overtime, while the sediment in the impact area remained the same, which could suggest fishing activity prevented this shift in the impact area. Comparing survey station of like substrate using one-way and two-way ANOVAs showed that as fishing effort subsided from 2015 to 2017 there was a marked recovery of taxonomic richness and abundance in the impact area. This suggests the benthic communities in this area of Georges Bank were resilient to the effects of fishing effort with mean densities of all categories recovering within two years. Cluster analysis, principal coordinate analysis, and discriminant function analysis showed that there was some grouping of data according to area and year implying that the areas were changing in a similar fashion over time. However, the results from the similarity indexes suggest that the presence of scallop fishing may have prevented the benthic communities and substrate from shifting as they would in an undisturbed area. The benthic communities in this area of Georges Bank were resilient to the effects of this fishing effort, recovering in mean densities and taxonomic richness, however the presence of scallop fishing may have prevented the benthic communities and substrate from shifting on the same frequency as undisturbed area..