Recovery of the seabed following marine aggregate dredging on the Hastings Shingle Bank off the southeast coast of England

Morphological characteristics of the Basque continental shelf (Bay of Biscay, northern Spain); their implications for Integrated Coastal Zone Management

“…Such information, in terms of bathymetry, seafloor type distribution and geomorphology, is a valuable source of information for: (i) the description of seabed processes and morphology (Hovland, 2003;Finkl et al, 2008;Hernández-Molina et al, 2008); (ii) habitat mapping (Kostylev et al, 2001;Orpin and Kostylev, 2006;Ryan et al, 2007;Wilson et al, 2007;Brown and Blondel, 2009); (iii) the distribution of benthic biodiversity (Baptist et al, 2006;Thrush et al, 2006;Zajac, 2008); (iv) fish species richness (Pittman et al, 2007); (v) the economic importance of species management (Kostylev et al, 2003;Lucieer and Pederson, 2008;Galparsoro et al, 2009); and, subsequently, (vi) the understanding of benthic ecosystems. Recently, such information has been used for: (i) Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) (Borja et al, 2008b); (ii) the morphological long-term development of dredged material disposal (Cooper et al, 2007;Marsh and Brown, 2009); (iii) the designation and management of marine protected areas (Harris et al, 2008); and (iv) marine spatial planning (Pickrill and Todd, 2003;Campbell and Hewitt, 2006). In particular, new uses of the marine environment (i.e.…”

Monitoring of dredged-dumped sediment dispersal off the Bay of the Seine (northern France) using environmental magnetism

“…In addition, dredged sediments originating from the coastal harbours and the navigation channels of the Seine are dumped at sea to maintain the necessary water depth for vessel navigation. Disposals of such dredged sediments potentially affect living organisms (Boyd et al, 2003;Cooper et al, 2007;Van der Wal et al, 2011), the water column (Fettweis et al, 2011;Roberts, 2012;Yang et al, 2012), and the sedimentary conditions at the seafloor (Du Four and Van Lancker, 2008;Lepland et al, 2009;Li et al, 2009). Thus, over the last decade, dredge dumping at sea has been monitored by several innovative approaches using natural radionucleides (Venema and de Meijer, 2001), acoustic techniques (Wienberg and Bartholomä , 2005), and particle-size distributions combined with metal concentration analyses (Okada et al, 2009).…”

Human pressures on UK seabed habitats: a cumulative impact assessment

“…Investigations of seabed recovery rates following disturbance provide a method of quantitatively estimating habitat sensitivity (Desprez 2000, Cooper et al 2007, Foden et al 2009. Habitats requiring long recovery periods might be considered more sensitive than those with more rapid recovery rates.…”