The Greatest Cave Restoration Success Story in the United States

GIS Sheds Light on Underground Wilderness

Hidden River Cave is located directly beneath the Town of Horse Cave in south central Kentucky. Providing shelter and water to native Americans for untold centuries, the cave holds an underground river that became the source of drinking water for the Town. At the beginning of this century, the river was harnessed to furnish hydroelectricity to the Town. The cave was also commercialized and shown to tourists from 1912 through 1943.

Groundwater pollution from domestic and industrial sewage was one of the factors that led to the cave's closing in 1943. For 50 years Hidden River Cave was little more than an open sewer. Although it was known that wastes were entering the cave, there was no understanding of the relationship between cave passages and the Town. Researchers began surveying the cave in 1989, mapping more than seven miles, but they were unable to create an accurate picture of the relationship between the underground passages and the surface terrain.

The Cave Research Foundation, currently leading the survey effort in the cave, was provided the software tools to do the job through the ESRI Conservation Program. Using ArcView GIS and the ArcView 3D Analyst and ArcView Spatial Analyst extensions, the Cave Research Foundation integrated cave survey data with USGS surface data to reveal the spatial relationship between the underground passages and the Town, clearly showing how local surface waste disposal sites fed directly into the cave.

This is not an isolated instance of the importance of having adequate geospatial tools for studying caves and karst (i.e., irregular limestone regions with sinks, underground streams, and caverns). In recent years the significance of karst and caves has achieved widespread recognition. As pointed out by the National Park Service's National Cave Management coordinator, Ronal Kerbo, cave and karst systems are important for two major reasons.

First, most of the nation's freshwater resources are groundwater. About 25 percent of the groundwater is located in cave and karst regions. The National Geographic Society notes that water resources are a critical concern as society enters the 21st century. The protection and management of these vital water resources are critical to public health and to sustainable economic development.

Second, caves are storehouses of information on natural resources, human history, and evolution. Recent studies indicate that caves contain valuable data that is relevant to global climate change, waste disposal, groundwater supply and contamination, petroleum recovery, and biomedical investigations. Caves also contain data that is pertinent to anthropological, archaeological, geological, paleontological, and mineralogical discoveries and resources.

None of the components of this interlocking set of resources can be fully understood without understanding their systemic relationships with the many other components. Understanding, protecting, managing, and conserving such an extraordinarily rich and complex set of resources requires tools capable of integrating, manipulating, and querying the information used to describe their many facets. GIS provides those tools.

In 1997, recognizing that GIS technology was rapidly becoming one of the most effective approaches to cave and karst resource management, the Cave Research Foundation established a GIS Resource Development Program. The goal of the program is to assist CRF personnel, federal agency staff, and other researchers access and utilize spatial data, GIS applications, and other software tools for the purpose of cave and karst resource management. A longer term goal is to use GIS to develop a collective knowledge and support base for cave conservation, protection, and management.

The importance of cave and karst research was also recognized at ESRI with the establishment of a Cave and Karst section in the ESRI Conservation Program and an ESRI Cave and Karst Special Interest Group that meets at the annual ESRI User Conference.

The CRF GIS Resource Development Program is drawing together GIS expertise to assist in the development of Cave and Karst Information Systems (CKIS). CRF GIS personnel include individuals with broad and varied expertise, who can provide resources, support, assistance, services, and tools to aid researchers in both understanding and effectively managing caves and karst.

Critical requirements in the CKIS development process are a survey of currently used software and methods, an inventory of existing data and data formats, a user needs assessment, a knowledge of training needs, and the initiation of a core CKIS prototype that can be tested and elaborated to provide specific tools and applications suited to the varying needs of different users.

In the case of Hidden River Cave, a few simple tools provided critical information about the mysterious world beneath a small rural town in Kentucky. The cave is now operated by the American Cave Conservation Association, which relocated their national headquarters to Horse Cave with the goal of restoring Hidden River Cave and establishing a museum and educational center at the site. Today, thousands of visitors and school children annually tour Hidden River Cave and the American Cave Museum at the cave's entrance. The cave, which has been called "the greatest cave restoration success story in the United States," is now open year-round to visitors. Guided tours lead visitors to views of the underground river and a turn-of-the-century hydroelectric generating system that once supplied the Town above with water and electric power.

For more information, contact Mike Yocum, director, Cave Research Foundation GIS Resource Development Program, 329 East Main Street, Frankfort, Kentucky 40601 (e-mail: myocum@mis.net).

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