Top 10% proposed priority areas for managing mobile bottom fishing on seabed sediment carbon.

The location of priority areas is shown with colours indicating the following attributes: (a) Mean organic carbon stock in the top 10 cm of sediment; (b) Mean cumulative annual disturbance to this organic carbon from mobile bottom fishing; (c) Mean net reduction in disturbance if the priority area was closed to mobile fishing and all effort was displaced to locations outside priority areas; (d) A relative fisheries disruption ratio (the proportion of total carbon disturbance mitigated to the total proportion of fisheries value that would be disrupted). In all cases colours closer to red would indicate a more preferential/beneficial priority area on a per unit area basis. See S6 Fig and S4 Table for location descriptors, total values and results as continuous data. Basemap adapted from MarineRegions.org. Available online at www.marineregions.org.