| The necessity to move from a traditional fishery management to an ecosystem approach is now acknowledged. Indicators are required to support the development of this approach. For example, community indicators have been proposed to assess the impact of fishing. We tested here the applicability of one such community indicator, the abundance-biomass comparison (ABC method), as a measure of the impact of bottom trawling (years of sampling: 2001 and 2003) on the benthic invertebrates-typically starfishes, crabs, squat lobsters, shrimps and large hard-shelled molluscs-of "Grande Vasiere", a major French fishing zone, in the Bay of Biscay. The ABC method is generally used as an impact indicator for different types of physical, biological and anthropogenic... |
