It was back in 2020 and COVID lockdowns that ACKMA, the Australasian Cave and Karst Management Association, decided to lead a volunteer, citizen science project to measure the ‘baseline cave climate’. That is, to collect data for the first time for tourist caves which were temporarily closed at the start of the pandemic.
Move forward almost five years, and cave climate data is still being collected from some of the original participating caves. With data coming in from New Zealand and, in Australia, from Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia, this is no longer a ‘COVID baseline’, but instead, a valuable baseline record of cave climate for the first half of the 2020s.
The cave cimate data being collected is temperature and relative humidity, and all the data can be explored at the ACKMA website at: https://ackma.org/CaveClimate/index.asp
Interested in the history of the project? You can read more from the first three years of the project in these publically available ACKMA Journal articles:
ACKMA Cave Climate Project – December 2020
ACKMA Cave Climate Project – an update
ACKMA Cave Climate Project Report
Andy Baker 
Leave a comment