Submit an observation
A record of a species from a cave, spring, well, or other
site
Distribution in this portal is built from published records, museum material, and survey reports. Plenty of what is known has never reached any of those. A record from a trip you made, whether or not it has been written up, fills a gap that nothing else will.
A confirmation that a population is still there is as useful as a new locality, and often harder to come by.
Two ways to send records
A few species
Use the form below. It takes a couple of minutes and suits a single species or a handful from one visit.
A whole trip
Use the spreadsheet. One row per species, the site details repeated, and room for counts, life stages, evidence, and coordinates.
Localities
Coordinates are never published. They are used to build maps and to work out which county and karst region a record falls in, and they are not shown on a page, included in a download, or sent to a browser.
They are also not stored on this website at all, which is why the form does not ask for them and the spreadsheet does. A file goes to a protected folder, is imported offline, and is then deleted. If you would rather not upload a file with coordinates in it, email it to info@cavebiology.org instead.
Cave names are published where they are already public, as most are: they appear in the literature, on maps, and in museum catalogs, and withholding a name that is already in print protects nothing. A name is withheld on request, where a landowner asks, or where naming a site would put it at risk. Say so in the notes and we will withhold it.
The Data Sensitivity Policy sets all of this out in full.
What happens to a record
- It reaches us privately. Nothing is published, and no page changes.
- We check the identification and the locality against what is already known.
- It informs the distribution behind the account, generalized to county and karst region.
- You are credited as the observer where you would like to be, and we write back either way.
Species that use caves without depending on them are not in the portal yet, but records of them are worth having and will be kept.