[vouaobrasil]

I do not doubt that people deeply understand the current state of the art, and that they understand those limitaitons. I am 100% in agreement.

But the fact that they understand the limitations and capabilities in their work has no bearing on the effectiveness of their work when it comes to the specific goal of protecting bird populations. (One does not logically imply the other.)

[K0balt]

I agree there is a disconnect in pure logic, but I think it is observable that science is often conducted with a goal in mind (and is not then logically pure as a pursuit).

When the goal is the preservation of a species through the understanding of survival pressures caused by human activity, I think that understanding of the limitations of the state of the art does in fact translate into progress towards actionable understanding of the “ground truth”. This becomes manifest once you factor in the motivations of the researchers, who will use that knowledge to press further study, make new hypothesis, and couch the conclusions of their studies with this knowledge in mind.

Every advancement in understanding is built upon the knowledge of the shortcomings of previous investigations.

[_yb2s]

Thanks- most people that are researching this are doing so because they care about birds and/or alternative energy- in most cases both.

[_yb2s]

You misunderstood what I was trying to say. I closely know people that do this work with the specific personal goal of protecting bird populations. They are confident they are able to do so, and I have faith in their level of competence based on knowing them well, and also being a scientific researcher in a different but related field. I expect this to carry zero weight as an argument, I’m just explaining where I am coming from.

I am curious enough that I will ask these details and follow up if I can…

[vouaobrasil]

> They are confident they are able to do so

I am certain they are confident they are able to effect change within the limitations that the economic system provides, which is also another difference.

[_yb2s]

So I asked- and they said (1) when the facility is large enough, which many are, you can randomly sample locations and if they died from injuries elsewhere these will still end up in the sample; (2) they do a lot of separate experiments to measure things like the rate of carcass removal by scavengers which go into the calculations; (3) depending on the type of bird and turbine, in most cases injuries are immediately fatal, and they can quantify this for each case with direct observation.

I’ll myself add that presumably the data collected on larger farms can be used as a prior to make accurate inferences on smaller farms.