Sleds and trawls can be used to successfully monitor changes in benthic communities over time (Billett et al. 2001), sometimes in combination with underwater imagery (Carter et al 2021). However, they are becoming less popular for this purpose due to their extractive sampling, difficulty in revisiting locations, and sampling variability due to species and size selectivity. In addition, more quantitative underwater imagery technologies continue to develop and become more accessible.
Instead, sleds and trawls are now most likely to be used in the early stages of a monitoring program to obtain baseline data which can then inform imagery annotations by providing species inventories or biodiversity assessments (Bearham et al. 2022), particularly as related to new, endemic, or cryptic taxa (Blake 2023). This is essential for environments and regions in which extractive sampling is the only means to examine and identify many species in complex ecosystems. The specimens themselves are used to inform taxonomic studies, ascertain species distributions, and as a source of genetic (DNA) and isotope data. Thus, their application is similar to grabs and boxcores, but sleds and trawls sample a large transect rather than a point (see Foster et al 2019 for further details on transect-based survey designs). Therefore, they may be more suitable to assess macrofaunal biodiversity in the deep sea where abundances may be low and deployment times are long (e.g. O’Hara et al 2020a,b).