“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
– Henry Ford
While we are an outstanding group of students who strive for complete excellence in all aspects of our work, at times we don’t recognize that failure can often be our greatest triumph.
Mapping a specific stretch of the Swift Run riverbed using a drone sounds like an easy enough task to accomplish in a swift amount of time (pun intended). That being said, we have faced hurdles at every turn of our process.
Our original preferred method of data collection was to take aerial pictures of the riverbed using a GoPro camera attached to our drone. Then, we would compile the photographs to make a map using geo-referencing software- simple enough. From there, the map would be used as a backdrop to help track tagged mussels’ location and hopefully predict where they are going, based on erosion and other environmental factors. Scientists could use that information to help cluster mussels together in order to aid species reproduction and repopulation- boom species saved.
It sounds like we’ve really got our stuff together, so where does our failure lie? Ever so humble, we failed to take into account two things. The first being that our camera of choice doesn’t take pictures compatible for the software available to us. That means we could have had a lot of pictures of river water that won’t aid in mapping the river.
The second factor we forgot to account for was nature. Our group had planned a trip to the Swift Run site this past Sunday, which had to be postponed after a torrential amount of hurricane-related rain washed over much of Virginia. Surges in water due to weather often changes rivers, and in our case can also cause mass-relocation of an animal already hard enough to track.
Will we be able to re-locate the tracked mussels after this tremendous storm? Have we found a new camera suitable for our endeavours? Have we learned from our failures this week?
Stay tuned to find out.
