> If you want to shock people, forget showing maps or even pictures of destroyed homes; just show them the footage of burning koalas being rescued and dying off their injuries; that's far more visceral
Also be sure to mention 500,000 animals have been killed in these fires.
A few days ago, they were saying 500 million plants and animals are affected, so that includes things like birds that flew away and will come back once the fire is gone. Not sure which source is more reliable. It looks like the 1 billion number also includes invertabrates, so I guess things like bugs.
I fully believe that a devastating number of animals have died, but when I see nice, big, round numbers like 0.5 or 1 billion thrown out there I wonder how we calculated this. How rigorous are these estimates?
Wildlife population demographic estimates are generally unreliable, even in the best of conditions. In the a well-conducted survey, the 95% confidence interval is going to be an order of magnitude--e.g., 10-100.
The number that's thrown out here is not strongly sourced, but given that it's in response to an ongoing event, I suspect that it comes from "take a stab at animals per hectare, multiply times number of hectares burned, and round up to next round number to maximize outrage." Or maybe it will be slightly more accurate, with someone taking the time to dig up some numbers from a prior survey to estimate population differences per biome and tracking down how much of each biome has died.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that these estimates (almost certainly) are not reliable.
Edit: someone else linked the source. The number turns out to be "number of animals per hectare * hectares burned." I still stand by my verdict of not reliable, as there is not an even an indication of what the range of uncertainty is in this information, just a single number.
Unless I am misunderstanding, this method assumes that all animals per hectare are non-mobile and do not run from fire. The impact from loss of habitat/starvation may end up making the numbers not far off though.
That is my understanding as well--the actual source states "affected" instead of "died." I have yet to see anyone actually give a reliable estimation of how to turn "affected" into "died", and I can sustain arguments for anything between 1% and 100%.
There are essentially three pieces of information going into this estimate: pre-fire density, fire acreage, and fire mortality (in the long run). The first number is known at best to an order of magnitude, the second is quite well-known (thanks to satellites), and the last appears to be unknown.
That assumption is not totally insane these fires are often moving at around 60km/h. Also from the videos I have seen you can see huge pile ups of burned animal bodies stuck on fences.
> In your thesis or dissertation, you will have to discuss the methods you used to do your research. The methodology or methods section explains what you did and how you did it, allowing readers to evaluate the reliability and validity of the research. It should include:
The type of research you did
How you collected your data
How you analyzed your data
Any tools or materials you used in the research
Your rationale for choosing these methods
Well sure, the methodology is touched upon, but not terribly thoroughly (perhaps there is a link to their actual calculations in there). But, that methodology rests upon other methodologies in other studies. I mean, not that that's inappropriate, this is simply the complex nature of scientific studies. But on any kind of topic like this, I get a constant impression from comments that "the science" is right there for the reading, no gaps or uncertainty exist whatsoever.
Are people literally saying exactly that? Well ya, a lot of the time they are literally saying that. But even if not, this is what is usually being implied, and it's certainly the impression readers are walking away with. In my experience, it's a rare person who can unemotionally acknowledge the fact that much of what we loosely refer to as "the truth" is actually just a big messy collection of approximations, if not outright imaginations in many cases.
> when I see nice, big, round numbers like 0.5 or 1 billion thrown out there I wonder how we calculated this. How rigorous are these estimates?
Round numbers are much more scientific, honest, and every other good thing than precise numbers are. You can estimate that 5-600,000,000 things died and present that as "500,000,000", a number with one significant figure. If you instead claimed that 516,772,943 things died, you'd be claiming to have a lot more knowledge than you actually do.
You should be inclined to trust big round numbers more than you trust odd-looking numbers, not the other way around.
When I see large round numbers like that, I alway figured the numbers were meant to be in the right magnitude but not exact. Like somewhere between 250M and 750M.
That's why they are called estimates, not real numbers. If they could run a census of animals living in the forest, there would be no need for estimates.
Also be sure to mention 500,000 animals have been killed in these fires.