“…Areas were defined as undisturbed, if they were known from fisheries‐enforcement data to have been subjected to no or negligible fishing activity for at least 10 years prior to the fishing experiment, or were known to have remained unimpacted because they were in marine‐protected areas or protected by seabed obstructions (Brown, Finney, & Hills, ; Pranovi, Raicevich, Libralato, Ponte, & Giovanardi, ). Areas were described as previously disturbed when subject to fishing disturbance in the last 10 years prior to the study (Castaldelli et al., ; Prantoni, Lana, Sandrini‐Neto, Filho, & deOliveira, ). To test for any effects of environmental factors that influence the growth rates, and hence recovery rates, of individuals and populations, we considered primary production (PP, mg C m −2 day −1 ) at each study site, as estimated from the vertically generalised productivity model (Behrenfeld & Falkowski, ); particulate organic carbon flux to depth (POC flux, g C org m −2 year −1 , Lutz, Caldeira, Dunbar, & Behrenfeld, ); mean sea bottom temperature (SBT, °C) calculated from monthly mean bottom temperature for 2009–2011 all sourced from the MyOcean product “GLOBAL‐REANALYSIS‐PHYS‐001‐009”; mean water depth (Depth, m) from GEBCO if not reported in the original study, and “biogenic (%),” “gravel (%),” “sand (%)” and “mud (%)” as continuous variables extracted from source papers or from dbSEABED (http://instaar.colorado.edu/~jenkinsc/dbseabed/, Jenkins, ) when data were not provided in the articles.…”