By Kathleen M. Wong

Two banana-yellow buoys anchored along the Tiburon shore will be San Francisco Bay’s sentinels against shifts in water chemistry due to climate change. Known as the Bay Ocean Buoy (BOB) and the Marine Acidification Research Inquiry (MARI), the permanent moorings will provide long-term monitoring of acidity and carbon dioxide levels—key indicators of how the changing ocean will impact Bay chemistry. “It’s taken over three years of perseverance and partnership building to get these instruments into the water, but now we’ll be able to reveal how ocean acidification may be influencing SF Bay now and in the future,” says Karina Nielsen, a San Francisco State Professor of Biology and Director of the Estuary and Ocean Science Center, where the one of the buoys is moored. “It will enable us to make better investments to promote the environmental health of the Bay.”