Water in Tampa Bay is getting hotter and fresher. That could spell trouble for seagrass.

Restoring the bay’s lost seagrass is urgent now more than ever. But climate change is making the task harder.

Marcus Beck plunged into Tampa Bay with a pizza box in his arms.

Snorkel in mouth, he slowly opened the box to reveal its contents. Instead of a cheesy pie, there was a copy of his team’s latest research paper. Stamped on top of the study, in bold red letters, were three words: Hot and Fresh!

Beck and a group of researchers at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program used the creative slogan in the title of their recent, urgent findings: Florida’s largest open-water estuary, Tampa Bay, is getting warmer and less salty over time, according to their analysis of decades of temperature and salinity data.

“We really liked ‘Hot and Fresh’ as an expression. It gets right to the point and it’s more intuitive to people: Tampa Bay is getting hotter and fresher,” said Beck, a program scientist at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program. Beck volunteered to dive into the bay, with the pizza box, for a video to announce the study. “It makes the science a lot more accessible.”

Tongue-in-cheek expressions aside, the findings underscore a difficult truth: Future efforts to restore the thousands of acres of lost Tampa Bay seagrass will be complicated by harsher conditions. In the face of hotter and rainier days, spurred by global climate change, ecosystem restorers will have to work harder to maintain a healthy bay, researchers say.