Stefan Stewart is a Canadian rock-climber who fell in love with the caves of Jamaica in 1987. Although still partly based in Canada, he spends as much of his time as possible in Ja, and has every intention of making a permanent move to the island in the near future.Caving activities have included:
Serving as the Principal Investigator for the cave component of the Parks in Peril project, under contract to The Nature Conservancy, Jamaica.
Serving as the Principal Investigator, under NEPA permit, on assessment and bioinventory of the caves of St James, the Cockpit Country, and St Ann, as well as assisting NEPA in several projects in other parishes.
Collaborating with various Jamaican and international researchers in the study of cave-adapted invertebrates, bats, and Amerindian archaeo sites.
Acting as the Chair of the Jamaican Caves Organisation.
During the course of his speleo explorations in Jamaica, he has added over 50 new caves to the Register, and has visited over 250 caves and sinkholes. Amongst the more notable of these are Hutchinson's Hole, in aid of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, Volcano Hole, Smokey Hole Cave and Dunn's Hole Cave.
Non-caving activities have included serving as one of the Directors of the Windsor Research Centre, in Trelawny, Jamaica; taking part, as the Principal Instructor, in two orienteering workshops for the WRC; assisting in several educational projects that are hoped to aid cave preservation; georeferencing the 1:50k topographic maps of Jamaica in a form that can be used by those without access to prohibitively expensive software; providing free methods, online, for datum transforms involving JAD69 and JAD2001; and geo-referencing the Troy-Windsor Trail in WGS84 for GPS use.
His main contributions to the Organisation are logistics, critter identification, geo-referencing, maintaining the website, and making sure that an appropriate number of cold Red Stripes are consumed at the end of a good day of caving. (He is also the one who answers the many emails that we receive, and must apologise for those that take some time to be attended to.)
The JCO Crew - Main Page