The central part of the Iberian Peninsula has few radiocarbon dated records of vegetation and climatic history for the Holocene. Extinct and active tufa-forming sites occur along the northwestern margin of the Sierra de Alcaraz. Tufas are often closely associated with the remains of plants and animals, and two extinct systems near the settlements of El Jardin and Alcaraz have yielded a record of environmental history that spans much of the last 6000 years. The record indicates that the present-day sedimentological regime and vegetation are human-induced, and probably extend back to about 2700 yr BP. Before this date, oak-dominated scrub (mattoral) was widespread. Prior to around 5000 yr BP the climate appears to have been relatively humid, and possibly cooler, and the catchments for the two sites were more wooded than today.

Marine reserves are implemented to achieve a variety of objectives, but are seldom rigorously evaluated to determine whether those objectives are met. In the rare cases when evaluations do take place, they typically focus on ecological indicators and ignore other relevant objectives such as socioeconomics and governance. And regardless of the objectives, the diversity of locations, monitoring protocols, and analysis approaches hinder the ability to compare results across case studies. Moreover, analysis and evaluation of reserves is generally conducted by outside researchers, not the reserve managers or users, plausibly thereby hindering effective local management and rapid response to change. We present a framework and tool, called “MAREA”, to overcome these challenges. Its purpose is to evaluate the extent to which any given reserve has achieved its stated objectives. MAREA provides specific guidance on data collection and formatting, and then conducts rigorous causal inference analysis based on data input by the user, providing real-time outputs about the effectiveness of the reserve. MAREA’s ease of use, standardization of state-of-the-art inference methods, and ability to analyze marine reserve effectiveness across ecological, socioeconomic, and governance objectives could dramatically further our understanding and support of effective marine reserve management.

a b s t r a c tThe ability to assess, model, predict and manage the impacts of climate change and other anthropogenic stressors on marine ecosystems depends on having adequate ecological time series. Unfortunately the development of ecological time series considerably lags those for the physics and chemistry of the oceans. Ichthyoplankton time series are proposed here to fill this gap in ocean observations. Marine fish species spanning a wide range of families, habitats, feeding guilds, and trophic levels broadcast large numbers of their reproductive products into the open waters. For a limited period, the larvae generally reside in the upper 200 m of the water column, where they may be quantitatively sampled with plankton nets. Larval abundance provides a relative index for adult spawning stock biomass, enabling diverse fish communities to be monitored quantitatively by relatively simple means. Recent analyses of the ichthyoplankton time series extending back to 1951 from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program indicate that non-commercial as well as commercially-exploited taxa have experienced dramatic change in recent decades. The CalCOFI data set is re-sampled here to show that a reduced sampling program-one based on a few stations along a single transect (cf 450 stations along 6 transects for CalCOFI) or one based on a shorter time series-can, within limits, obtain similar single-species and multivariate patterns of abundance. Ichthyoplankton survey programs may thus provide the basis for a global system of ocean ecological observations in addition to their primary use today for fisheries stock assessment.