Marine protected areas have become an important management tool that can provide data regarding human impacts on the ocean while protecting exploited species, enhancing biodiversity and protecting ecosystems. Long-term monitoring of reserves is critical to assess how global processes such as natural environmental variation and climate change affect marine populations. We conducted fish egg surveys in both soft bottom habitat and kelp forest and identify fish eggs using DNA barcoding. We compared these data to baseline spawning data established by Harada et al 2015. We documented large inter-annual variability in fish egg abundance associated with climatic fluctuations, including an El Niño event captured during our sampling years. Interestingly, we observed a phenological shift of peak spawning activity during 2017. We found inter-annual fish egg abundance may be linked with upwelling regimes and winter temperatures. We found no distinct differences in community composition between habitats we sampled.

Through long-term monitoring of fish spawning we can understand how natural environmental variation such as El Niño events affect fish populations which will help us predict how temperature increases associated with climate change will affect marine fish populations. Furthermore, long-term monitoring can help track trends in marine resource availability and evaluate marine reserve efficacy.

The overall goal of this project was to develop the necessary infrastructure to permit species identification of California marine fishes using molecular sequence data. This involved the following efforts. 1) Compilation of an up-to- date list of marine fish species occurring in and around California. 2) Collecting and archiving in the Marine Vertebrate Collection, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, tissues and voucher specimens of California marine fish species. 3) Development of a standardized protocol for molecular identification of fishes, including sample preparation/DNA extraction, DNA amplification via polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and DNA sequencing, using three mitochondrial gene sequences (cytochrome b, 16S ribosomal DNA, cytochrome oxidase 1). 4) Making sequence data available on-line permitting remote comparison of sequence data with reference sequences from known species.