Atlas of Cave Morphs

A new project of the UIS Commission on Karst Hydrogeology and Speleogenesis

The project has bin stated. It's new location is here

Rationale

The meso-morphology of caves is one the most important characteristics of caves indicating their origin. However, genetic interpretation of individual morphs is not straightforward and unequivocal. A possibility to access and discuss the wealth of images of both typical and unique cave morphologies, accumulated by cave explorers and scientists from various regions, may facilitate greatly their understanding and interpretation. This would serve to better categorize cave morphs, identify and resolve interpretative controversies and establish more clear criteria for adequate morphogenetic interpretation of key cave morphologies.

The goal of a new project of the UIS Commission of Karst Hydrogeology and Speleogenesis is to establish an Internet-based "Atlas of Cave Morphs" and provide a collaborative workspace for the image collection, analysis, interpretation and categorization. Such an Atlas would be certainly valuable reference and research tool in cave and karst science.

Implementation

This page serves the purpose to present the rationale for this project and invite colleagues to indicate their interest to take part in the Atlas and share their views and suggestions on how to organize and conduct this collaborative effort (welcome to the Atlas Section in the Forum). This is also an invitation to browse through your personal and/or institutional collections and start selecting and organizing images for submission to the Atlas.

We are currently working on designing an image database system, a searchable interactive repository of annotated images of typical and unique cave morphologies. The "Atlas of Cave Morphs" will include options for submission of images with their annotations and metadata for collective interpretations and improvement of these starting annotations. We anticipate making the system functional by October 2007.

A working sketch of the appearance of an individual image with its metadata in the Atlas is presented below as an example.