A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities replicates an earlier rooftop-solar washing trial on campus roofs, and campus facilities will now wash or waive the wash according to whether the roof is attested as roosted.
A replication of the quarterly-wash finding on covered walkways and bike shelters turns up an effect the original trial did not
From the coming teaching period, a roof on the University’s covered walkways and bike shelters will be washed, or left to the rain, according to whether pigeons have been counted on it. The arrangement follows Was It Really Only the Rain?, a new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities, which takes an earlier finding, that quarterly washing changed nothing the rain had not already done, onto twenty-four campus roofs and does not find it there.
A result that has been reported once is a good deal easier to be surprised by the second time. We are glad the roofs were willing to be counted.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Over six quarters, in four staggered sequences, the team followed the output of each roof’s solar array for a fortnight after every wash, alongside dusk counts of the birds that use it. The wash effect comes to 1.8 percentage points, against 0.11 in the original trial, and grows with the size of the roost.
Campus facilities have taken both results as guidance. Roofs attested pigeon-free keep the original no-wash waiver, and roofs attested pigeon-present take the quarterly wash. The attestation is completed by the crew that carries out the wash, and a new box on the form records whether the finding replicates. The earlier result stays on the register as it was filed. Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, said the original club roofs “were a fair test, and so are these.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1zpc2j.