(Courtesy of UC Davis College of Letters and Science)

A year ago, Bay Nature editor in chief Victoria Schlesinger asked us to guest-edit this issue while she took some time off to recharge. This is not an easy publication to temp for! It is an incredible privilege to work with the group of editors, writers, illustrators, photographers, and readers that contribute to this community. 

Earlier this year a book by the two of us, Eric Simons and Tessa Hill, was published: At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans, about the human connection to the sea. We wanted to use this issue of Bay Nature to expand on that theme and to dive into stories from our changing Pacific. In the coming pages, you’ll find new science and new stories about the ocean. Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright found researchers deploying video games and artificial intelligence to understand the depths of the “midnight zone.” Jesse Greenspan caught a rare press trip to the Farallon Islands to report on the uncertain future for seabirds and scientists there. As another El Niño departs the Pacific, and with a La Niña forecast for the winter, author Mary Ellen Hannibal shows how a big-picture perspective on marine life can help us understand such major ocean events. Surf documentary filmmaker Sachi Cunningham writes about her personal connection to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and why it’s worth immersing yourself however and wherever you can. And as always, we cover people, places, and natural history worth discovering.

In At Every Depth, we wrote about how the ocean is changing and the pressures those changes place on the human relationship to it. There is bad news aplenty, but we emphasized as often as we could the opportunity to improve the systems and structures that have led to this point. We talked to ocean-lovers all around the world who are invested in building stronger cultural systems that connect people to the sea. One way we work toward a more sustainable relationship with the ocean is to establish a culture that feels connected to the ocean, and a culture that has the opportunity to look closely, to explore, and to understand.

As its tagline says, Bay Nature has always been about building that connection: Look into nature and understand everything better. It’s an honor to continue that work. And we dedicate this issue to the idea of turning the ocean, so often the big blue empty space on the map, into something everyone can know.

—Eric Simons and Tessa Hill
Guest Editors

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Tessa Hill, a professor at UC Davis, has taught classes on oceanography and climate change for over a decade. Her love of the ocean started as a child on the cobble beaches of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. Her career as an oceanographer has taken her to the North Atlantic, the Oregon Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and the California coast. But she is happiest perched along a bluff outside Bodega Marine Laboratory on a sunny day. www.oceanclimatelab.com

Eric Simons is a former digital editor at Bay Nature. He is author of The Secret Lives of Sports Fans and Darwin Slept Here, and is coauthor, with Tessa Hill, of At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans.