Evaluation of Temporal Correlation between Genomics and Potential Habitat Predictions in Pacific Sardine (Sardinops sagax)

Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) are a component of the coastal pelagic fish species assemblage in the eastern North Pacific. Historically, Pacific sardine were a major contributor to the U.S. fishing industry and in the 1920s and 1930s the fishery for Pacific sardine was the largest in the Western Hemisphere (Norton and Mason, 2005). Like many other coastal pelagic fish species, Pacific sardine population size fluctuates greatly over both short and long-time scales. These fluctuations seem to be environmentally regulated (Mantua and Hare, 2002), and sardines appear equipped to remain at low population numbers without genetic bottlenecking (Lecomte et al. 2004; Longo et al., 2025).