Bottom trawling affects seabed habitats, but its large‐scale impacts remain poorly quantified. Assessment of trawling impacts is essential to support monitoring and achieving sustainability objectives under international conventions, sustainable development goals, and seafood certification programs. We present a Europe‐wide quantitative assessment of bottom trawling impacts, accounting for regional seabed‐community sensitivity...

To inform ecosystem-based fisheries management in line with the EU legislation objectives for marine fisheries, we evaluated the ecological outcomes of alternative spatial management scenarios to fisheries that consider the ecological impact of bottom trawling on the benthic ecosystem in the Eastern Ionian Sea. Trawling intensity in terms of swept area ratio (SAR) and benthic community sensitivity were combined to estimate the...

Food production is known to have significant environmental impacts, with the main contributors residing in the farming and transportation life cycle phases. Of the various food products transported around the world, avocados have increasingly gained attention as a high-commodity superfood. Avocados require specific climatic and agricultural conditions for farming, with the most fertile land and conditions located outside Europ...

Ports and neighbouring cities function as connectors between land and water and have long accommodated a substantial flow of goods and services. Port cities in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region and the Global South (GS) are rapidly and inevitably expanding as the demand for global trade increases. However, this expansion has numerous impacts on the surrounding marine ecosystem and the socio-economic livelihoods of local co...

Background Climate change and human activities continue to drive a widespread decline in global mangrove coverage, undermining their capacity to provide ecosystem benefits. While global and local scale drivers of change on mangroves are widely acknowledged, the relative importance and the exposure of mangroves to climatic, geomorphological, and direct human threats vary spatially. Understanding the role and relative importance...

Rapid intensification of environmental disturbances has sparked widespread decline and compositional shifts in foundation species in ecosystems worldwide. Now, an emergent challenge is to understand the consequences of shifts and losses in such habitat‐forming species for associated communities and ecosystem processes. Recently, consecutive coral bleaching events shifted the morphological makeup of habitat‐forming coral assemb...

Fishes contribute substantially to energy and nutrient fluxes in reef ecosystems, but quantifying these roles is challenging. Here, we do so by synthesising a large compilation of fish metabolic‐rate data with a comprehensive database on reef‐fish community abundance and biomass. Individual‐level analyses support predictions of Metabolic Theory after accounting for significant family‐level variation, and indicate that some tro...

Observations of the Magadi tilapia Alcolapia grahami in hot, highly alkaline Lake Magadi revealed that they air breathe not only during hypoxia, as described previously, but also during normoxia and hyperoxia. Air breathing under these latter conditions occurred within distinct groupings of fish (pods) and involved only a small proportion of the population. Air breathing properties (duration and frequency) were quantified from...

Mapping of ecosystem components (natural and socioeconomic) is a prerequisite for ecosystem-based marine spatial management (EB-MSM). To initiate the process of EB-MSM in the Greek Ionian Sea and the adjacent gulfs, the main relevant ecosystem components were mapped based on existing spatial information and expert judgment. The natural components mapped included habitat types and species targeted for conservation, according to...

Reports of coral diseases are increasing and may result from human land use and climate change conditions such as increased water temperature, coral bleaching, runoff from land, and changes in the ecology of heavily fished reefs. We examined a stable coral syndrome or a growth anomaly [ Porite growth anomaly (PGA)] (skeletal tissue anomaly, hyperplasia, or ‘tumor’) that was present in 0–15% of massive Porites colonies in 12 Ke...

Priorities for conservation, management, and associated activities will differ based on the interplay between nearness of ecosystems to full recovery from a disturbance (pristineness), susceptibility to climate change (environmental susceptibility [ES]), and capacity of human communities to cope with and adapt to change (social adaptive capacity [AC]). We studied 24 human communities and adjacent coral reef ecosystems in 5 cou...