Abstract
Oil spills can have a serious negative effect on seabirds. Numerous studies have been carried out for relative vulnerability assessment of seabirds to oil, with the majority of such works based on ordinal quantities. This study aims to assess (from the aspect of measurement theory) the methodological approaches used for calculating the vulnerability of seabirds to oil spills, and corresponding conclusions. We assess several well-known works on the vulnerability of seabirds (1979–2004). We consider the effect on derived conclusions of (a) monotonic initial data transformations on an ordinal scale, (b) multiplication operations on the same scale, and (c) the replacement of initial metric data to ordinal. Our results show the following: (a) the conclusions for arithmetic operations may not be saved with permissible monotonic transformations of ordinal quantities; (b) partially uncertain results can be obtained with arithmetic operations on an ordinal scale as compared with metric; (c) the replacement of metric values to scores changes the real relationships among initial data and affects the final result. Thus, conclusions in works which use arithmetic operations with ordinal quantities cannot be considered to be justified and correct, since they are based on unacceptable operations and, quite often, on the distorted original data.
Highlights
To protect the marine environment, it is extremely important to assess the possible impact of various anthropogenic factors on the marine biota, and oil spills are perhaps the most important aspect here
Ordinal quantities can enter into empirical relations only and do not have measurement units or quantity dimensions
Numerous publications on the evaluation of the vulnerability of seabirds to oil pollution and of the methods for assessing vulnerability for marine areas have used ordinal quantities
Summary
To protect the marine environment, it is extremely important to assess the possible impact of various anthropogenic factors on the marine biota, and oil spills are perhaps the most important aspect here. Wind farms can have a serious impact on marine biota, because their construction on the shelf may become the most extensive marine engineering project in Europe. Such projects have raised widespread discussion in connection with possible harmful impacts on the environment and, in particular, on seabirds. In [13], the methodology for calculating vulnerability from wind farms was applied with some inevitable changes to assess the impact of oil spills on birds
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