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Special Report Cave and Karst Mapping Today by Susan Smith
The special application of GIS to the cave and karst industry has grown a great deal. Ten or twelve years ago, Bernie Szukalski, manager of the Cave and Karst Program at ESRI, reports that when he doing mostly local government types of applications, the focus was on automating data and connecting attribute information about that data and integrating that into GIS, "in other words, the primary use of the GIS was as a warehouse for the cadastral database and info about the cadastre. In a lot of ways that''s where a lot of cave and karst applications are today. Many of the cave resource management folks that utilize GIS are still in the process of building their database and collecting cave inventory information - data about various things in the cave, such as biologic data, geologic and mineralogic data, archaeologic data, and other information, and using the GIS to store and manage that information." Many people are now going beyond simple data storage and management, and beginning to utilize more advanced GIS capabilities to explore more fully the potential of GIS. Back in 1988 http://www.caves.org/section/ccms/fcrpa.htm the U.S. Government adopted the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act, which became a catalyst for people to begin using GIS. What the Federal Cave Resource Protection Act did was elevate protection of cave resources on the priority list and make government agencies that have significant cave resources responsible for managing those resources. Those government agencies included a lot of the typical landholding agencies such as the Forest Service, BLM and the National Park Service. Because of the Federal Cave Resource Protection Act, many of these people had to formalize their information gathering about cave and karst features and develop management plans for those caves, meaning learning more about them, and doing inventory. Basically that started the formalization of an official methodical manner of managing cave resources, and as a result all the parks services and BLM now have cave resource specialists that utilize GIS in various capacities. Local, state and city governments have begun to realize that karst areas - areas where caves exist and where underground water flows - present special concerns to the public. In the southeast U.S., karst areas are widespread. There are some engineering problems in karst areas because of the possibilities of sinkholes, water back up in the aquifer, and floods. A lot of bread and butter GIS is done by consultants who deal with engineering aspects of karst areas. There are sinkholes that flood periodically. Land practice aspects and land management in these areas can become critical as agricultural fertilizer runs off into sinkholes and disappearing streams, then enters the aquifer. In a karst situation a sinkhole that might lead directly to an underground conduit for water. Today there is greater awareness of land management practice and the impact of possible pollutants on karst aquifers. (See "Living with Karst - A Fragile Foundation" http://www.agiweb.org/pubs/pubdetail.html?item=630601 A paragraph on that can be found in one of the archived ESRI Cave and Karst eNews editions: http://www.esri.com/industries/cavekarst/cavekarst_enews_0601.html#ck6 ) Cave and Karst Mapping Today Continued… The Kentucky Geological Survey is one of the many state and local government agencies that uses GIS in karst mapping. - according to Bernie, they have developed detailed karst maps, including groundwater basins and sinkhole locations, using GIS. They try to integrate that information into their local government planning, zoning and land use activities. Urbanization of karst areas creates a number of problems. Beyond problems with groundwater contamination, sinkholes can open, swallowing roads and buildings. These issues require special consideration for development in karst areas, and this is where state and local governments see a great need for. There are also examples of grass roots organizations and loose collections of cavers that have organized themselves into "state cave surveys" and use GIS to manage their database. The vast majority of the cave survey data in the world is gathered by volunteer cavers who do it because they love to cave. Many of these grass roots cavers have joined forces with local government agencies to work on specific projects, such as the Edwards Aquifer in San Antonio, Texas. The Edwards Aquifer is the largest karst aquifer and a significant water supply for many of the cities in that part of Texas. In 1987 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the Aquifer the first "Sole Source Aquifer" in the U.S. As a result, various state, regional, and local regulatory programs have been initiated to protect water quality in the region. The local cavers got a conservation grant for ESRI software and contributed their cave database to the project, so that the city and the Edwards Aquifer Authority could use the information to identify where critical areas existed and needed protection. In Kings Canyon National Park, Joel Despain and Shane Fryer created a detailed map of the Hurricane Crawl Cave. Joel used GIS techniques to develop a management plan for a cave that is a fairly recent discovery and very pristine, which houses a large number of rare and fragile features and endemic species. A special management plan was developed for this cave to make some parts of the cave basically off limits and some parts only accessible by limited numbers of people and limited to times of the years. To help figure out which areas should be manage more carefully, or to figure out which routes in the cave would be reasonable for visitation he developed a detailed GIS for one particular cave, going down to mapping individual formations and quantifying the relative value of those features in the cave. In the Parks Systems, even in the longest caves-- 100+ mile long caves - the bulk of the survey data is done by handheld compass and clinometer. A team will be formed of three or four people minimally, and one person will set up a station and will take a compass reading to the next station. A person will take a tape and measure the distance, take a clinometer and measure the inclination or declination between the station, and then measure the level right up and down dimension of each certain station. Once, you had to crunch the numbers yourself and sit down with a compass, a ruler and a big sheet of graph paper and plot everything out by hand. When you draw a map of a cave you''re creating a planimetric map which is why you have the clinometer because you take the cosign of the angle times the distance and that give you the correct planimetric distance. If you''re measuring down a 45 degree slope that distance is longer than it actually is in planimetric view. Cavers have developed their own cave survey data automation programs and some of these are actually quite sophisticated. Some of them are free, a lot of them are shareware. These eliminate a lot of the hand work. You can still collect the data by hand but the raw survey notes you turn into this program and the program does all the hard work for you. It allows you to produce a line plot and you can look at things in 3D and extend dimensions out to include your left and right up and down measurement. While visiting Hawaii Volcanoes National Park five or six years ago, Bernie Szukalski, his wife and some friends volunteered to help map caves in the park for a week. Cave Resource Specialist Bobby Camara used ArcView at the park, and had a lot of cave survey data. Bobby understood the benefits of GIS to manage the cave data, however did not know how to get the cave data into the GIS Bobby discovered Bernie worked for ESRI, and asked Bernie to help find a way to integrate the Park''s cave survey data into the GIS. As Bernie describes it: "My wife and friends were having fun surveying caves and I stayed at the office and wrote code all day -- a conversion program that converted cave survey data from COMPASS, a popular shareware program used by many parks, and wrote a conversion tool to convert COMPASS data to ESRI shapefiles. That''s how the park started getting their cave survey data into ArcView and it used to be one of the only ways to do it. Since then there are a couple of other ways to do it." See CaveTools The late USGS employee William Davies had developed the first U.S. Karst Map which has now been updated by George Veni. This karst map did not use any GIS, however, a national karst map effort is underway which promises a new, more detailed map. This map will most likely make use of existing GIS databases and may include GIS or web-based GIS applications at the end. The U.S. Karst Map can be located on the Geography Network by typing in "karst" in the search area. It can also be found in the Journal of Cave and Karst Studies, April 2002, Volume 64, Number 1, published by the National Speleological Society - A link to the Journal and online Journal papers can be found at the National Speleological Society site www.caves.org Some interesting links on cave and karst mapping:
ESRI on cave mapping:
The Federal Cave Resources Protection Act: The National Cave and Karst Research Institutei: http://www2.nature.nps.gov/nckri/
The CaveTools extension for ArcView page:
Cave mapping software:
The Western Kentucky University, Hoffman Environmental Research Institute
is one of the leading cave/karst universities applying/teaching GIS. Some
interesting links related to WKU:
Karst groundwater map. One of many fine examples of GIS use for mapping
done by the KY Geologic Survey:
Bermuda Cave and Karst GIS page - project kicked off in February 2002: |
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