About the portal
What this is, who makes it, and how it is put together
The Cave Biology Data Portal is a reference for the subterranean fauna of North America and around the world. It brings together in one place what is otherwise scattered across taxonomic revisions, agency reports, museum catalogs, and sequence databases: what a species is, where it occurs, how threatened it is, and what material exists to study it.
Why it exists
Obligate subterranean species are among the most restricted and least known animals on the continent. Many are known from a single locality. More than half of those with a conservation rank are ranked G1 or G2, meaning critically imperiled or imperiled. Yet the information needed to protect them sits in journals that are hard to find, collection databases that are only partly digitized, and the memories of a small number of specialists.
Compiling that into one reference makes the fauna legible: to researchers designing surveys, to agencies making listing decisions, to landowners wondering what lives beneath their property, and to anyone who did not know these animals existed.
Scope
The portal currently covers the obligate subterranean fauna of the United States and Canada: 1,445 species and subspecies that complete their life cycle underground, both aquatic stygobionts and terrestrial troglobionts.
The framework already accommodates species that use caves without depending on them, and taxa outside North America. Both will be added as the compilation allows.
How accounts are built
Every account begins as a structured record: accepted name and authority, classification, distribution generalized to county and karst region, conservation ranks from NatureServe and the IUCN, federal listing status, cataloged museum material, and published sequences. Those fields are compiled from the sources listed in the Acknowledgments and carry the date they were retrieved.
Accounts are then written up as time and expertise allow, adding description, habitat, ecology, genetics, etymology, and conservation narrative. Written accounts are attributed to their authors, versioned, and separately citable.
This means accounts differ in depth, and the portal says so rather than hiding it. A stub with accurate structured data is more useful than a narrative written from guesswork.
Localities
Exact cave localities are never shown. Distribution is published generalized to county or karst region, and coordinates are withheld as a matter of policy rather than because they are missing. Qualified researchers may request them directly.
The reasoning, and what is withheld and why, is set out in the Data Sensitivity Policy.
Who makes it
The portal is compiled and maintained by the Cave Bio Lab at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, led by Dr. Matthew L. Niemiller, Director. This effort is partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award No. 2047939. Hosting, design, and maintenance are provided by Niemiller Nature LLC.
Species accounts are written by named contributors. If you work on a group covered here and would like to write or review accounts, we would like to hear from you.
Current status
The portal is new and incomplete in ways worth stating plainly. 1,192 species have no published sequence data. 558 have no cataloged museum material we can locate. Most accounts are structured records rather than written narratives. Photographs exist for very few species. Distribution maps are not yet published.
Absence of a species from the portal does not mean it is absent from a place. Most caves have never been surveyed, and subterranean fauna is consistently under-recorded.
Using and citing
Text and data are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Images are not; each carries its own credit and terms. See Citation and Licensing for how to cite an account or the portal as a whole.
Get in touch
Corrections, contributions, data requests, and questions are all welcome. See the Contact Page for where to send what.