Comparison of mechanical disturbance in soft sediments due to tickler-chain SumWing trawl versus electro-fitted PulseWing trawl

This study was part-funded by the EU FP 7 project BENTHIS (grant no. 312088). It does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission and does not anticipate the Commission’s future policy in this area. We are grateful for the logistic support of VLIZ, the fishermen of TX43 and TX29 and crew members of RV ISIS and RV Simon Stevin during the sea trials and NIOZ for the use of their box corer. ADR and LRT were partly supported by the project “Impact assessment pulsvisserij”. We are indebted to the skippers and Eddy Buyvoets for drawing the net plans of the trawls. We thank John Aldridge for his insights in sediment transport in relation to natural dynamics; Bavo De Witte for conducting the particle size analysis; Daniel Benden for assisting SPI analyses; Miriam Levenson for English-language editing and Julie Bremner and Stefan Bolam for their critical review. We also wish to thank 3 anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.Peer reviewedPostprin