Andy Baker

Back in 2020, in the depths of COVID lockdowns here in Australia, the Australasian Cave and Karst Management Association organised a cave climate ‘baseline monitoring’ project.

At that time, numerous tourist caves were closed to visitors. The opportunity was taken to record the cave climate. Data loggers were calibrated and shipped to the participating cave organisations. They regularly sent back cave temperature and relative humidity data. These were analysed, with updates published regularly in the ACKMA Journal. You can read them here.

I don’t think anyone planned beyond the COVID lockdown situation. The tourist caves reopened, and many stopped cave climate monitoring. However, five years later, and some cave organisations are still sending in the data. The ACKMA team are uploading it to their website for everyone to see. Head there to make some cave climate graphs.

I made the latest data upload a couple of weeks ago, thanks to new data sent in from Yanchep and Caldargup, National Parks teams in Western Australia. There have also been recent updates from Te Anau in New Zealand, Chillagoe Caves and Capricorn Caves in Queensland, Wellington Caves in New South Wales, and from the caves at Mole Creek in Tasmania.

The ‘baseline’ period has long passed, but since then, other environmental changes have occurred at several of the sites, and we can investigate if they have had any director or indirect effects on cave climate. For example, there have been floods at one of the Mole Creek Caves, fire over one of the Western Australian caves, and climate change impacts that include a long-term drying trend in the southwest of Western Australia.

Many thanks to all the partners and volunteers who have helped keep the data coming. Apart from the original purchase of the data loggers and replacement batteries by ACKMA, this project has been unfunded. And it continues. Next week I will check logger calibrations and download data at Wellington Caves in New South Wales and in August I aim to do the same at the caves in Western Australia. Look out for further updates in the future.