How does this sound for a dream vacation? Volunteer with the Earthwatch program and spend several weeks in Kluane National Park, learning about grizzly bears and helping scientists with a range of tasks, including learning how to snag hairs from the bears' dense coats.

This summer more than 40 people are paying good money to participate in this program, helping wildlife biologist Ramona Maraj with a wide-ranging study on how human use of the land affects grizzly bears in the park.

Earthwatch, a non-profit environmental group, sets up partnerships around the globe between scientists, educators and volunteers. The scientists get help with their projects, and the volunteers gain in-depth knowledge of the subject at hand, and make a contribution in the process.

David Rein, an Oregon engineer who is now volunteering in Kluane, is an Earthwatch veteran. Two years ago he volunteered on a grizzly bear study in Glacier National Park in Montana. This summer he already had plans to travel in Alaska, so when he learned about the Kluane study he quickly signed on.

Rein says that being a part of a scientific study in Glacier was a real highlight for him. "It piqued my interest in bear behaviour," he says. "I am fascinated with the science of it."

Maraj, a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary, is trying to determine which areas in Kluane provide prime habitat for grizzly bears. She has already spent two field seasons mapping vegetation in the Kluane area, and also gathering information on bear mortality.

Her goal is to develop what is called a "cumulative effects model" for Kluane National Park. This computer model will be designed to integrate the whole range of human activities in the area, and how their combined impacts might affect the bear population.

"The idea is that rather than looking at how something like hiking by itself might affect the bear population, you would look at it in combination with a possible widening of the highway, river rafting and increased development on the park boundary," she says.

Previous research on grizzly bears has focused on the Alsek River area in the southeast portion of the park, so Maraj is now looking at bear habitat in the drier north end of the park.

This summer she has set up a grid system covering about 3000 square kilometers of land between Mount Wallace and the area where the Donjek River intersects the highway. The grid is divided into cells that are about sixty four square kilometer in size, and each of them has a trap designed to snag hairs from the grizzlies.

Animals are lured to the traps by a smelly mixture made from rotting fish fertilizer, oil, and liquefied dead animal parts, which is poured into the ground around the station. Maraj explains that an odour is used as the lure so that there is no possibility of the bear being rewarded or staying around to guard the area.

To investigate the odour, the bears must pass under a strand of barbed wire that snags a bit of their hair. A genetic analysis is then run on the hairs in order to identify individual bears and track their movements from cell to cell.

If bears are not attracted to a particular bait station, the surrounding habitat is examined more closely. The bears' absence might be explained by poor vegetation or a large amount of rock, or the number of trails in the cell.

The main objective is to determine which areas the bears use the most, and what draws them to those areas. "The theory is that in areas where you get bears, there is some sort of habitat feature driving that attraction. That is the theory but we have not run the analysis yet," says Maraj.

Kluane National Park takes in 22,000 square kilometers, but most of that is covered by snow and ice. Only 4,000 square kilometers, or 18 percent, of the park is vegetated.

As human use of the park is also concentrated in this green buffer zone, park managers are hoping that Maraj's study will help them ensure the continued health of the bear population in the Kluane area, while also minimizing the number of encounters between bears and humans.

This information is particularly important for some of the small communities in the Kluane region. "Places like Klukshu are right on the bank of a salmon-bearing stream, so it is hard for people to conduct their daily lives without an encounter with a bear," says Maraj.

But gathering this sort of information is labour intensive, so Maraj is delighted to have help from the Earthwatch volunteers. "So far almost every volunteer that we have had has been phenomenal," she says, adding that she has been particularly impressed by some of the teenage volunteers with whom she has worked.

Most of the volunteers have been Americans, which is understandable since the $1500 cost of the program is in U.S. dollars. That money goes toward Earthwatch's administrative costs, covering expenses for the volunteers, and some of it also helps to fund Maraj's study.

For his part, Rein lives in an area where grizzly bears were exterminated more than a century ago and says he had always assumed that Canadian bears might one day help repopulate the American West. After only a few days in Kluane he has already learned about pressures on grizzly populations in places like British Columbia and Alberta.

An amateur photographer, he hopes to give slide shows on his Kluane experience, and efforts there to protect the grizzly population. "I'll be able to speak with a little more authority and hopefully offer some encouragement for people working very hard to protect these animals," he says.

For more information on the Kluane bear project, contact Ramona Maraj at rmaraj@ucalgary.ca or visit the Earthwatch web site at www.earthwatch.org.