The Iberian sardine (Sardina pilchardus) is distributed along the whole shelf of the Iberian Peninsula with the highest catches being taken from southern Galician waters and northern Portugal. The fishery is dependent on the strength of the recruitment in this area and recruitment processes seem to be driven by a combination of oceanographic (local) and climatic (global) events. In an exploratory analysis we examined whether the variability observed in landings from ICES areas VIIIc (northern) and IXa (western Iberia) from 1940 to 2005, and in estimated annual recruitment and spawning stock size for the whole stock could be related to environmental conditions at large and local scales, taking into account temporal autocorrelation in the response variables. Landings for areas VIIIc and IXa show differing trends and were most strongly related, respectively, to the multi-decadal Atlantic oscillation (AMO) and to SST (with an optimum around 15o C). Recruitment was negatively related to air temperature (AT). We stress the need for taking into account time lagged effects, non linear relationships, autocorrelation in response variables and collinearity between explanatory variables. We discuss possible mechanisms underlying these observed patterns and whether the apparent climatic relationships have any predictive value
