We are a team of researchers (and cavers) working at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and we are looking for cave survey data to building a statistical database. With this database, we hope, for example, to infer plausible karst system geometries beyond human-accessible passages. Our research takes place in a much larger project on flow and solute transport in karst environments founded by the European union: (https://erc-karst.eu/).

We are reaching out to you to see if you or any members of the caving community would be willing to participate by sharing with us some of your survey data. We started our call for data a few months ago and got a positive answer from several clubs and individuals in Switzerland, Slovenia, and Austria. We are now extending our search for datasets to other countries and clubs.

Would you be willing to share our Call for Data with the members of your caving community? We understand how valuable those datasets are and how demanding this data collection is in terms of time and effort. We are hoping that by deciding to share some of your data with us, we can further valorize it.

The datasets can be shared through a confidentiality agreement, or an open data agreement, depending on the sensitivity of the data. We can offer options for archiving the dataset, depending on the needs.

If you are interested in our project and have further inquiries, please contact us at erc.karst@unine.ch. We will be more than happy to chat with you about the details!

I hope that our message will be well received and I thank you a lot for your help!

Celia Trunz

Postdoctoral researcher

Center for Hydrogeology

University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland