Every summer, thousands of people from around the world flock to my city for a now annual firefly festival hosted in the Congaree National Park. For a two week period, tourists gather along the park’s central boardwalk to see one of the best displays of synchronous fireflies in the world. Unfortunately (yet necessarily), like many other events this year, the festival was cancelled because of COVID-19.
However, that cancellation enabled researchers a rare look at the fireflies without all of the crowds that normally accompany them, as seen in this article.
This past week, my task has been to classify the central projects of the biological reserves DukeEngage Chile is studying. When reading the firefly article, its perspective of finding the silver lining of the festival’s closing caught my eye. Like the reserves I classify on the spreadsheet, Congaree National Park has a central project. Anyways, the park is making sure that its central project gets done even in the face of the coronavirus.
For Congaree National Park, pursuing its project meant researchers could come and do their studies. However, knowing how the research would get used would have been interesting. When working with the reserves on the spreadsheet, knowing context about the research helps my classification. The article did not give the perspectives of the scientist and what the research was being used for. It would have been a more fulfilling read if they had.