PCLM-D-22-00031

Interactions between mobile fishing gears and seabed carbon stores in the UK, with options for protection

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Epstein,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 10, 2022. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
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• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Renata Hanae Nagai, D.Sc.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Dear Dr. Epstein,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate.

I have completed my evaluation of your manuscript. After receiving reviewers' comments, I have read your manuscript's methods section carefully. I agree with reviewers that this section needs further clarification, particularly over model assumptions and how carbon loss is estimated. Reviewer 1 highlighted significant concerns with several aspects of the work regarding the oversimplification of assumptions and its impact on the prediction capacity of the simulated outcomes. I agree that these are major issues. These aspects need to be highlighted throughout the manuscript and thoroughly discussed as they significantly impact the overall goal of the manuscript, serving as a guide for policymakers to determine priority protection areas.

I am recommending the reconsideration of your manuscript following major revision. However, all issues mentioned in the reviewers' comments need to be carefully addressed, and your revised submission may need to be re-reviewed.

Sincerely,

Renata

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Review Epstein

This manuscript addresses the important issue of how we can manage the impact of bottom trawling on seabed sediment carbon stores. Unfortunately, it does so in a way that is not technically sound, and relies on extrapolations that go a very long way beyond what can be considered reasonable.

The most important issue is the workings of model that is used to predict the effects of trawling on seabed carbon and how it is applied in this study. The underlying model was published in a previous paper (De Borger et al. 2021), and makes predictions of carbon loss for just 5 locations, 3 of which are in the very coastal zone of Belgium, and only one of which is even in the UK EEZ. The manuscript assumes that these predictions for these single locations are applicable to the whole UK EEZ (classified as being similar to a point), and this is not justifiable. (For the editor, please check Figure 1 in De Borger et al., https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/18/2539/2021/bg-18-2539-2021.pdf to see how unrepresentative these locations are for the UK EEZ). The conclusions of the manuscript are strongly dependent on a spatially accurate assessment of carbon loss due to trawling, and the authors realise this because they go through a lot of effort to get the best possible fishing effort maps. I find it therefore inconceivable that they think it is appropriate to apply these predictions for individual stations with very specific environmental conditions to vast areas that are different in so many ways from the 5 stations for which the predictions where made. The model code from De Borger is available and could have been run for every cell in UK EEZ to get more spatially resolved predictions. This approach also has weaknesses but would be so much better than what is done now.

However, this brings me to a second weakness in this model, which is that the fate of resuspended material is not dealt with. Because they evaluated the effects in a 1D model that provides a point prediction, the De Borger outputs implicitly assumes that any resuspended carbon is 100% lost. This assumption is obviously not true when applied over larger scales, because a lot of this carbon will be refractory and resettle quickly, but it is also a key assumption because this is what drives almost all the loss of carbon from the sediment that the model predicts. My guess is that without this loss term, the effects of trawling on seabed carbon would be at least 80% smaller. The prediction that results from this, that 50% of carbon will be lost after 15 years of trawling, is just not credible as bottom trawling has a 50+ year history and no clear depletion of seabed carbon is obvious from observational studies (for example shown in a review by Epstein et al in GCB 2022). In this discussion the authors say something about these limitations, and how disturbance doesn’t equate to loss, but in the rest of the manuscript including the conclusions and the abstract this distinction is not made and the suggestion is that all this carbon is lost. If hardly any the disturbed carbon is lost then the conclusions would be very different. Until the difference between disturbance and loss is resolved, there is little point in carrying out exercises like this.

Even though the authors put lots of effort into mapping fishing effort, they ignore the effect of different gear types. De Borger assesses the effects of beam trawling only, and this gear disturbs the seabed to a greater depth than the much more widely used otter trawl, resulting in an overestimate of effects. Beam trawling doesn’t occur on the muddy seabeds where this manuscript shows large effects, because that is where otter trawling for Nephrops is carried out.

It is good that the authors explicitly consider the effects of effort displacement, but I could not follow how they did this and this requires clarification.

I also couldn’t follow how the priority areas for protection were identified, and in my view, doing this is also so premature that it is not useful because it hides the underlying patterns of carbon loss that are the actual results of the analysis.

Almost all areas highlighted as having high carbon loss are areas where otter trawling occurs on muddy grounds targeting Nephrops. It would be useful to point this out as the closed area network would result in the total loss of this sector.

I don’t find the colour scales used in the map intuitive.

It may be true that the target species sought by mobile bottom fisheries, such as flatfish and shellfish could still be targeted in these areas by fishing methods which cause little-to-no disruption to the seafloor, but that does not mean that catches can be maintained.

I understand that exercises like these can be worthwhile and often require a few simplifying assumptions, but the number of oversimplifications in this manuscript that strongly affect the outcomes is too large, and can not be justified, and I would be very worried about if the conclusions of this manuscript would be used to inform policy.

Reviewer #2: Epstein and Roberts present an interesting case study on how benthic trawling impacts carbon loss in marine sediments of the UK’s EEZ. The study is novel and interesting because they examine how differing protection scenarios that account for fisheries displacement influence carbon savings. Overall, I think the study and the presentation of the work is well crafted and will be of interest to the research and policy communities. However, I think the authors need to clarify some of their methodologies; including a more thorough description of the De Borger model, the assumptions of the model, and what carbon loss in the model is actually estimating. Below I provide more detailed comments on where I think the clarity of the manuscript needs to be improved.

Mobile bottom fishing disturbance and impacts on organic carbon sections. It would be helpful to the reader to provide the equation on how you calculated fishing impact on OC in the “Impact of fishing on organic carbon” section, with references to how values in each parameter were calculated (or decided).

Related to the inclusion of an equation, I have questions about how penetration depth (or impact depth) was incorporated into the carbon disturbance model. Trawling disturbance is not just about the SAR; it is more about the SVR (surface volume ratio) because you must include the penetration depth of the gear as an impact. In this manuscript, I am struggling to understand how (and where in the equation) the depth of the trawling gear is included in the calculation of organic carbon impacts and how it relates to the total depth of 10 cm in the model. I understand they are using De Borger’s model, but it is important for this manuscript to elaborate on how some key parameters are dealt with because De Borger’s model was a multi-year model that aggregates impacts over 15 years. In contrast, the model in this manuscript needs an annual C impact.

It is important for the authors to define “carbon loss” and what their disturbance model is estimating, as well as any assumptions their estimates make concerning the carbon loss. There are multiple fates for disturbed carbon and it needs to be clear whether their model is estimating the total amount of carbon that is disturbed (e.g., the amount of carbon that trawling disrupts but the fate does not matter), is remineralized to CO2, or is relocated. I originally thought that their model estimated the amount of carbon remineralized to CO2, but their statement on lines 471-472 about the caveat that some of this lost carbon could be transported makes me wonder what the model is actually estimating. If the model is indeed estimating the total carbon disturbed by trawling, not just the proportion remineralized to CO2, then the authors are making a huge assumption (and one that is not supported by the literature) that all of that carbon is remineralized.

Line 99: In marine carbon methodologies, carbon density is defined as the per unit volume; so its units generally are something like kg C m3 (as in Diesing et al. 2021). Conversely, carbon stocks, are units per area. So, kg C m2 is a C stock, not a C density. Both Smeaton and Wilson misuse the term carbon density. However, the fact that Diesing et al. 2021’s data is in C density (kg/m3) and Smeaton and Wilson are in stocks, brings up the question of whether you corrected Diesing’s data into a stock before taking the average of the data sets?

Minor revisions

Line 51 and throughout: I understand why Epstein and Roberts use tons as the metric for measuring carbon, but it is strange to combine both an imperial and metric unit together (e.g., t/m2 or t/km2), although I realize this is often done. Consider using all metric

I suspect that this is a very small proportion of trawling in UK waters, but did you constrain your fishing impacts to a water depth of less than 1000m (or 2000m). One could argue that any trawling occurring in deeper waters would not influence carbon cycling in policy-relevant time-frames (i.e., it takes thousands of years for that carbon to reach the ocean surface).

Line 95-96: Does Atwood et al. not provide global marine carbon stocks down to 1m (see https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Global_marine_sedimentary_carbon_stock/11956356 ). I don’t think down to 1 m is required for your study because the carbon model you use is for 10 cm, but as written this line isn’t entirely correct.

Line 314. Please add what proportion of the EZZ the study area represents

Line 326 remind people that <100-4159 t OC km-2 is in the top 10 cm only.

Fig. 1b. What are the grey areas? Are these MPAs, areas that just aren’t fished (but could be) or are they areas where data is lacking? Please describe in the figure caption.

Fig. 1a. Choose a starker color contrast for the zero carbon (i.e., rock). Right now, it looks like there is lots of no carbon in the southeast, but Fig. S1 suggests that most of that should be FineL sediments.

Lines 372 and 465 what is the average proportion of the total carbon stock that is lost each year?

454-456, the comparison with terrestrial soils is strange because it is not the same depth. I suggest you extrapolate the terrestrial results to 10 cm or EEZ carbon to 30 cm for a direct comparison. You can do this by assuming (and stating in your discussion) an equal distribution of carbon with depth. So, 550 Mt / 30 cm = 18.3 Mt per cm -> 18.3 Mt per cm *10 cm = ~183 Mt in the top 10cm of terrestrial soils. This helps solidify the point that marine sediment are much greater than terrestrial soils.

Line 471-472 This statement is a bit clunky and redundant, and I think that the authors need to be more intentional with their wordy about the assumption their model makes. I suggest changing the statement to something like “Our model assumes that all of the lost carbon is remineralized to CO2. However, some portion of the lost carbon could be transported elsewhere where it is reburied.”

Line 478-479 I do not understand what this sentence is trying to say. Please clarify.

527-532 please provide the CO2 equivalents for the carbon lost somewhere in this section

527-532- Because carbon financing only deals with atmospheric emissions, it is important to clarify that the total cost of carbon savings assumes that all of the carbon lost due to trawling is remineralized to CO2 and that 100% of that is emitted to the atmosphere.

Line 540 remove the word “vary”

Line 577 clarify that 914.4 kt is from the burning of fossil fuels.

Line 597 increase the impact of this statement by providing a statement on how much extra CO2 could be being produced due to trawling impacts on carbon storage in the seabed.

Line 579 increase the impact of this statement by also adding in a statement on your finding on how carbon financing could eliminate the financial burden of closing some trawling grounds.

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6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PCLM-D-22-00031R1

Identifying priority areas to manage mobile bottom fishing on seabed carbon in the UK

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Epstein,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that your manuscript has improved but still need minor adjustments to fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please follow Reviewer 1 recommendation and make it more explicit in the abstract that your findings are linked to carbon disturbance rather than carbon emissions. I also ask that you address Reviewer 2 comments regarding uncertainties in estimating the fate of carbon in disturbed blue carbon habitats. Additionally, both reviewers indicate that data underlying the findings in your manuscript has not been fully available, please read the PLOS Data policy and provide the data either as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository.

Please submit your revised manuscript by August 20th. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Renata Hanae Nagai, D.Sc.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I have reread the paper, and I was happy to see that the unjustifiable extrapolation of the Borger model were dropped. The paper now focuses on an analysis of the spatial overlap between carbon stocks and fishing. Although it is obvious for the reader of the full ms, it would be good to make it a bit more explicit in the abstract that this is about carbon disturbance, and not carbon emissions, because there is a major risk of misinterpretation of these results. The collation of the data layers was done with care and precision, and the explanations of displacement are much clearer. All in all I’m happy for this to be published.

Reviewer #2: Although I think that the authors could have done a bit more to tweak the model and discuss its limitations to get at carbon loss, I understand the choice to rebrand their paper as it seemed unlikely that they would change Reviewer 1's opinion of the applicability of such a model to this area. Overall, I think that the authors find a suitable solution to the criticisms raised by reviewers (especially Reviewer 1); Even without the carbon loss component, this study provides a nice case study for imagining how fisheries behavior/management and MPAs can influence reductions in disturbance to marine sedimentary carbon, even if our understanding of trawling impacts on carbon dydnamics is in its infancy.

My one suggestion for improving the manuscript is that the authors add to their discussion (and perhaps introduction) some parallels with the blue carbon literature to help bolster the importance of their study despite their inability to estimate carbon loss. For example, there are huge uncertainties in estimating the fate of carbon in disturbed blue carbon habitats (i.e., mangroves, seagrasses, and tidal marshes), many of which parallel uncertainties with trawling effects on seabed carbon. Yet, hundreds of papers have been published on how anthropogenic disturbances to blue carbon ecosystems impact carbon stocks with little more than a conversion of 100% of the stocks to CO2. This uncertainty doesn’t diminish the importance of these studies, rather they set the upper bounds for imagining how these disturbances can impact carbon storage.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Identifying priority areas to manage mobile bottom fishing on seabed carbon in the UK

PCLM-D-22-00031R2

Dear Dr. Epstein,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Identifying priority areas to manage mobile bottom fishing on seabed carbon in the UK' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact climate@plos.org.

Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Renata Hanae Nagai, D.Sc.

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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