This pressure principally affects the seabed habitats and is associated with bottom-contacting mobile fishing gear, in particular beam trawling and otter trawling as well as local activities like dredging or those linked to tourism such as anchoring.
Using vessel monitoring system (VMS) and logbook data, ICES estimates that mobile bottom trawls used by commercial fisheries in the 12 m+ vessel category were deployed over approximately 144 300 km2 of the ecoregion in 2018; this corresponds to approximately 19.1% of the ecoregion's spatial extent (Figure 6).
