Bryn Athyn College Alumni Magazine Winter 2015 | Page 32

Dr. Eugene Potapov and Dr. Ed Higgins
[pictured above] send a remote signal to
open up William’s collar [pictured below]
so it simply drops off him. Then, using
a tracking device to locate the dropped
collar. Once they retrieve the collar, they
will reuse it on another deer (one of the
collars has been reused over 12 times).

A 2007 Environmental Science class tracks
deer during their weekly lab peorid. Left to
right: Michael Conaron, Graham Lexie, Jennica
Smith, Adolf Ollennu [holding the tracking
device], India Wyncoll, and Stewart Chapin.

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At its most basic level, the study involves getting
a team of trained students and professors to gather,
often in the dark of the night, with flashlights, at a preset, first-ever internet-controlled deer trap. At the site, a
couple of people from the
group will hold the deer
still enough to fit it with
a GPS tracking collar,
and then let the deer go
free (the trapping is done
under a license granted by
the Pennsylvania Game
Commission). Over the
course of the next few
months, through its
fits a deer with a GPS tracking
GPS collar, the deer sends Potapov
collar, and then lets the deer go free.
thousands of text messages
that tell of its location (one text every five minutes).
With a brilliant “mail to map” system conceived
by Potapov, each deer has its own Google email
account and blog, which send information to Google
Maps and Google Earth. This system is so innovative
that Potapov was flown to Google to present on
this work. With this technology, the research team
can watch how the deer moves, in real time, over
a photo-realistic map of the terrain, providing an
unprecedented amount of data. Students in the math
and science classes then work with the data to make
predictions and hypotheses, test them and draw useful
conclusions, which in turn provide useful information
to organizations such as PERT (Pennypack Ecological
Restoration Trust.)
Dr. Fredrik Bryntesson, a member of the Deer
Study team and Chair of the Science Department
at Bryn Athyn College, explained, “The membersupported PERT is benefitting from this research.
For one, it is a crowd-puller. People who walk the
Pennypack Preserve are saying, ‘I saw a deer with a
collar. Can you tell me more?’ We also put up peoplecounters (instruments that automatically count when
people walk by) in the preserve, so now PERT can
get information about where the deer go and how
people move on their lands. That is data they wouldn’t
have otherwise, and it is important for grounds
management.” In addition, if PERT wants to increase
or decrease deer density, they can use the deer tracking
analysis to help decide where to plant or cut down
vegetation.
Some might ask, “Is this deer study humane?” It
seems that it truly is. Over the past eight years, since