Animal observations can reveal ecological change in marine protected areas, but their conservation importance and their ability to diagnose climatic causes are different properties. This critical narrative synthesis examines how those two properties differ across four observation classes: benthic condition, coastal fish composition, seabird reproduction and unusual animal occurrences. Selected primary studies and methodological papers were compared according to response mechanism, observation scale, environmental exposure and alternative explanations. The first author’s doctoral thesis on Al Hoceima National Park, Morocco, provided the local application context without contributing new population estimates or climate-attribution results. The synthesis identifies three recurring interpretation problems: mismatched spatial and temporal scales, changing observation effort, and transfer of relationships between species or regions without local testing. It develops an indicator–evidence matrix, a minimum record specification and a conceptual decision diagram that separates conservation urgency from confidence in a climatic explanation. Benthic condition surveys paired with temperature at organism depth offer a tractable event-monitoring approach; fish thermal composition requires repeated, comparable community sampling; reproductive measures integrate wider food-web and disturbance effects; and isolated occurrences primarily support verification and targeted follow-up. A worked detection example demonstrates why repeated non-detection remains conditional on observation probability. For Al Hoceima, the proposed first step is to recover and pair existing benthic photographs and temperature records before expanding monitoring. The contribution is a testable design for interpretation, not a validated early-warning system or evidence of local climate-driven decline.
