Conserving Resources in Natural Caves with GIS

Students from Browning and Bigfork High Schools, in Northwestern Montana, have been volunteering since 2003 to map and conserve the natural resources in natural caves of Glacier National Park.

In the spring of 2009, a grant worth $10,000 from Best Buy, enabled the schools to purchase computers and GIS software, with the help of Denny Rae, a GIS specialist from Flathead County, and Bern Szukalski, ESRI’s cave and karst program coordinator. Rae approached Hans Bodenhamer, the teacher of the students, proposing to incorporate GIS in his curriculum.

After having installed the software, Bondenhamer asked help from Ben Sainsbury, a GIS specialist at Central Washington University, to help teach the kids in inputting data and learning more about GIS. After a month, all the data from the past five years of volunteering in the Glacier National Park have been entered in the software.

Bigfork High School uses GIS in geo-referencing the maps. They also filled-in a vector image of the cave as a separate layer so that if it was turned on, it can show the orientation of the cave. The over-laying topographic map serves as the background for the raster cave maps and other layers.

Other layers were also developed about the general information of the maps such as the entrance, elevation, length and depth of the cave, the average air temperature and the classification of the cave resource significance.


Source:

GIS Educator
http://www.esri.com/library/newsletter/giseducator/gised-winter10.pdf