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Highlands Today

Archbold Bear Research At Standstill After Expert's Death

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By Douglas  Carman | Highlands Today

Published: July 15, 2008

VENUS - Nearly a month after a plane crash took the life of a noted black bear researcher, research on South Central Florida's black bear population has been at a near-standstill.

Since the June 20 crash, which killed University of Kentucky professor David Maehr and local citrus grower Mason Smoak, a lone researcher and other workers at the Archbold Biological Station have carried out only one small project related to Maehr's unfinished research.

Aside from that, they have mostly been left to putting together the data that the University of Kentucky professor left behind.

"Dave had many ongoing research projects," said Hillary Swain, Archbold's executive director. He had ongoing research on bears, elks and warblers in Florida and Kentucky, according to the University of Kentucky's Web page.

Swain said the station is currently trying to figure out how to continue his work. Just before he died, Maehr was tracking 23 bears fitted with radio collars and newer GPS transmitters.

John Cox, a Kentucky conservation biology associate professor and one of Maehr's research assistants, has been given the task of leading the bear research in his place, Swain said.

In a phone interview, Cox said he was expecting to take over Maehr's research and expand on the bear project in Highlands County, but he did not know how long it would take before he could get it restarted.

"We're working to try to get through the administrative hoops to continue the project," he said.

Cox said that Maher and the other researchers from Kentucky were trying to see how the bears traveled through their habitat, including the surrounding ranches where Archbold's tracking data spotted a few bears.

'Archiving Mode'

Right now, Marta Gandolfi, an intern who came to the Archbold station from Italy to work with Maehr, is the only remaining researcher in the area focusing on the bear research, and she's returning to Italy at the end of the month. She said she had to borrow a plane used in another research project for a day to track one of the bears whose collar fell off.

Two graduate students who worked under Maehr were nearing the end of their master's degree studies at the time of Maehr's death and returned to Kentucky shortly afterward. Gandolfi, meanwhile, was left with the task of supervising the project until Cox and a new group of students can come down.

Gandolfi is primarily putting together a master database of the data Maehr gathered from tracking the bears, including their weights, locations, genders, migration patterns and other bits of information from the collars.

"Right before he died, we were working on real-time movement of bears," said Roberta Pickert, the station's geographic information systems (GIS) manager.

Pickert's does the GIS work for all the projects in the station, but she remembered how Maehr kept up with the more advanced GPS collars that would transmit its information like a cell phone to the laboratories in both Archbold and Kentucky.

She and Swain echoed Cox's hopes to get the research going again, even as Cox stated that it could take anywhere from "a few weeks to a few months" to get it going full-speed again.

"We got all our fingers and toes crossed," Pickert said.

Reporter Doug Carman can be reached at 386-5838 or dcarman@highlandstoday.com

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