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. The cave climate monitoring of Australasian caves continues. I last provided an update in July 2025. Six months on…

Five and a half years since the start of the project, 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 explore the data.

Over the holiday break, we processed the latest data from Yonderup and Crystal Caves at Yanchep National Park in the western coast of Australia; data from Donna Cave and Trezkinn Caves in the northern Queensland interior; and Te Anau cave in New Zealand. These caves have now reached five and a half years of cave temperature and relative humidity monitoring. Other partners are continuing data collection and more caves will join the ‘five and a half year club’ soon.

The ‘COVID baseline’, a time when numerous tourist caves were closed to visitors, has long passed. Now we can start to investigate long-term trends in cave climate. Head here to explore the data. We have started to add summary graphs with interpretations to the website. For example, Yonderup Cave is shown below.

Interested in reading more about the ACKMA cave climate monitoring project? We regularly publish updates in the ACKMA Journal and back issues are freely available here: head to issues 131, 127, 122, 121, 120 and 119.

Many thanks to our collaborators who keep the data coming in to new data sent in at Yanchep and Caldargup  in Western Australia; from Te Anau in New Zealand; Chillagoe Caves and Capricorn Caves in Queensland; Wellington Caves in New South Wales, and from King Solomon and Marakoopa caves at Mole Creek in Tasmania.