Southern Europe has seen constant heat waves, forest fires and new heat records, and Tromsø in northern Norway has had a record number of summer days with temperatures above 20 degrees.
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1Department of Oceanography and Fisheries, University of the Azores, Horta, Portugal
2Department of Biological Sciences and K.G. Jebsen Centre for Deep-Sea Research, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Few studies have described the effects of physical disturbance and post-recovery of deep-sea benthic communities. Here, we explore the status of deep-sea sponge ground communities four years after being impacted by an experimental bottom trawl. The diversity and abundance of epibenthic megafauna of two distinct benthic communities in disturbed versus control areas were surveyed using a remotely operated vehicle on the Schulz Bank, Arctic Ocean. Four years after disturbance, megafaunal densities of the shallow (∼600 m depth) and deep (∼1,400 m depth) sites were significantly lower on the disturbed patches compared to the control areas. Multivariate analyses revealed a distinct separation between disturbed and control communities for both sites, with trawling causing 29–58% of t