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“Drought: I’ll be back!”: Communicating the San Diego County Ecosystems Report with Buttons


Communicating science can be difficult, especially if your audience members aren’t scientists by training. The San Diego County Ecosystems Assessment, a part of California's Fourth Climate Change Assessment to be released in late Summer of 2018, is 150+ pages long. To make the findings more accessible to practitioners, the Alliance developed a 34 page summary magazine, which can be downloaded here. To add a little fun, we created buttons featuring short slogans to communicate key points of the report.

Drought: “I’ll be back!”

Drought is becoming an increasingly scary topic for Californians. So if we had to pick a film character to represent drought, we’d pick our iconic governor well known for his role as the Terminator. The image on the button represents precipitation with a markedly seasonal structure, year-to-year variability in Southern CA which is higher than anywhere else in the continental US fluctuating between droughts, extremely wet years and periodic floods (Dettinger et al., 2011). This graph is based on drought data from the U.S. Drought Monitor and can be accessed here.

Want more details? Refer to the “Precipitation and Drought in San Diego County” chapter in the summary magazine, viewable here.

Want this button? Enter in our social media contest!

To win this week’s button, follow these simple rules:

  1. Follow the Climate Science Alliance on at least one of our social media channels:

  2. Follow us on Instagram here

  3. Follow us on Facebook here

  4. Follow us on Twitter here

  5. Tag one friend in a comment on this week’s post

That’s it! Each comment counts as one entry, you can comment as many times as you want for more entries. We will randomly select one winner to receive 2 buttons — one for you and one for your friend! Winners will be announced one week from original posting. Good luck!

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