WKU Cave Survey workshop

[Dwight Livingston]

Western Kentucky University is again offering their cave survey workshop. This comes around only every other year, and it's only $475 as a non-credit workshop, if you sign up early.

Field Methods for Karst Studies: Cave Surveys and Inventory
June 20-26, 2010, Mammoth Cave, KY
Ms. Patricia Kambesis
Cave maps and inventories are fundamental to the understanding of cave and karst environments. This course will focus on incave data collection (with an emphasis on sketching), cave resource inventories, constructing survey data/inventory databases, creating maps and transforming the data maps into GIS format. Techniques for collecting cave survey and inventory databases will be examined with emphasis on obtaining the most useful data in the field.
Registration: Graduate, Undergraduate, or Workshop

http://caveandkarst.wku.edu/10brochure.pdf

[George Dasher]

It would be interesting to know what Pat considers a cave-resource inventory.

I would consider it ridgewalking, or an inventory of the karst.

However, since I went to a inventory discussion at a convention a few years back, I suspect Pat would consider it to be an inventory of whatever is in the cave passage. An inventory of stuff in addition to the cave map.

During our convention discussion, some people were mentioning things like flowstone and alluvium found in XYZ cave passage, while other people were mentioning things like the where and what of karst features, such as entrances, springs, and the like.

[driggs]

It would be interesting to know what Pat considers a cave-resource inventory.

I don't want to speak for PK, as she occasionally posts here on CaveChat, but I was fortunate enough to recently take her Survey and Cartography course, and one of my end-of-week projects was a GIS-based cave resource inventory.

I'll refer you to this 2005 KCKMS paper by Johanna Kovarik and Pat Kambesis, "Cave Resource Inventories: Why are they important?"

Cave resources are defined as all of the secondary attributes and features, both natural and man-made, which reside within the confines of the cave or cave system. Natural features include the biota, paleontology, mineralogy, speleothems, and sediments. Man-made features can be of archeological, historic, or cultural origin.

The first step in managing, protecting, and studying caves resources is to know what and where they are. Resource inventories are descriptive lists of the cave resources referenced to survey stations.

Seth Spoelman recently showed me an impressive use of the vast cave resource inventory from Jewel Cave. Using ArcGIS, he generated a surface of the ancient paleo-karst by interpolating between all the survey stations which listed "paleofill" on their inventory.

These are generally used in large National Park caves, where it might be critical to know exactly where all your native american artifacts, saltpeter artifacts, fauna sightings, geological contacts, ropes, ladders, or concession stands are.