Resilience of seamount benthic communities to trawling disturbance

Despite bottom trawling being the most widespread, severe disturbance affecting deep-sea environments, it remains uncertain whether recovery is possible once trawling has ceased. Here, we review information regarding the resilience of seamount benthic communities to trawling. We focus on seamounts because benthic communities associated with these features are especially vulnerable to trawling as they are often dominated by emergent, sessile epifauna, and trawling on seamounts can be highly concentrated. We perform a meta-analysis to investigate whether any taxa demonstrate potential for recovery once trawling has ceased. Our findings indicate that mean total abundance can gradually increase after protection measures are placed, although taxa exhibit various responses, from no recovery to intermediate/high recovery, resistance, or signs of early colonisation. We use our results to recommend directions for future research to improve our understanding of the resilience of seamount benthic communities, and thereby inform the management of trawling impacts on these ecosystems. •Bottom trawling impacts to seamount benthic communities can last for decades.•Seamount communities as a whole appear to have limited resilience to trawling.•Potential for recovery from trawling impacts varies amongst different seamount taxa.•‘Recovering’ seamount communities can be viewed using a patch dynamics framework.