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Caving

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Outdoor Recreation

Abstract

Caving damages a specialised, rare, and delicate environment which can never recover. The aim is to minimise this mostly unintentional damage. The number of cavers is small but they can damage caves in many ways: the geological environment, cave fauna and flora which is specialised and often endemic. Bats are important and have suffered in North America from white nose syndrome, partly spread by cavers. Many potential management strategies for caves exist including cave plans, conservation codes, and National Conservation policies. Controlling access can be important and there are access agreements, zero, restricted or periodic access, booking systems, gating, sacrificial caves, zoning in caves, cave exploration policies, and cave fauna management, including building artificial bat caves. Education for cavers includes minimal impact codes, websites, leader and instructor schemes, involvement in cave conservation planning, and cave adoption schemes and alternatives to caving, such as the use of mines and artificial caves.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK

    David Huddart

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  1. David Huddart
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Huddart, D. (2019). Caving. In: Outdoor Recreation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97758-4_12

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