Environmental monitoring is crucial for determining how the natural environment works, and how it responds to outside forces like climate. Cave and karst environments need monitoring like everywhere else, but pose both specific challenges and specific opportunities. For instance, the lack of surface runoff makes monitoring biogeochemical processes on the landscape a headache, but the abundance of human-accessible underground space provides unique opportunities to observe groundwater infiltrating the vadose zone in a way that can only be inferred elsewhere.

Cave and karst monitoring is continuously developing technologically and methodologically, but a standard play book is beginning to emerge. This standard set of approaches is built on monitoring the ventilation of cave chambers / passages using temperature probes, sometimes combined with CO2 and / or radon monitors and the movement of water via drip counters and water level monitoring. Air flow speed / direction, humidity, water conductivity and pH and a range of additional specialist monitors exist for specialist deployments. For other needs, autosamplers are available which can take and store physical samples for analysis following a pre-set time step.

This workshop will introduce the most common monitoring approaches of the standard playbook, including monitoring strategy and design, logger placement and initialisation, data recovery and initial analysis.

Delegates should register their intention to attend to Mike Rogerson (michael.rogerson@northumbria.ac.uk). Please bring a laptop and a survey of the cave or karst area you are interested in monitoring. If you are unable to bring a laptop, let Mike know.

For further information please see our Science Symposium circulars, posted to our News Forum.