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CAVEMONITOR: Monitoring Show Cave in Romania

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CAVEMONITOR: Monitoring Show Cave in Romania Program and Abstracts—21st National Cave and Karst Management Symposium CAVEMONITOR – Monitoring Show Caves of Romainia 1 Silviu Constantin and the CAVEMONITOR Team “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology, str. Frumoasa 31, 010986 Bucharest, Romania Romania hosts spectacular karst areas with The project includes 5 show caves from many caves holding the potential to become the Southern and Western Carpathians and touristic attractions. While the number of caves and one laboratory cave used as a reference opened for tourism is still low, in the last years site. The project includes the monitoring of there is a trend of opening new caves for tour- the number of visitors and groups frequen- ism or re-fitting old show caves by using new cy, paralleled by the monitoring of the main lighting technologies and construction materials. physico-chemical parameters of the air In the last 4 years only, 5 new caves were (CO2, temperature, RH) and drip and con- opened for tourism and a couple of others are densation waters (drip rate, temperature, currently being under consideration for develop- conductivity, pH, water chemistry). Meteor- ment. However, at a national level there are no ological parameters are monitored using au- management protocols enforced to monitoring tomated weather stations located in the close changes in show caves and none of the caves vicinity of all caves. We also monitor the opened to tourists have any such monitoring. vertebrate (Chiroptera) and invertebrate The CAVEMONITOR project started in the populations from caves, as well as the mi- summer of 2014 and aims at establishing a ro- crobiological composition of the air, water bust protocol of monitoring the impact of tourist and sediments. To assess speleothem vul- traffic upon the biotic and abiotic elements in nerability to the changes in chemistry of show caves and to apply it as a pilot-study. The condensation or percolating waters calcite protocol includes monitoring of physical and precipitation stations are installed and peri- chemical parameters of the caves (from air, wa- odical measurements of stable isotopes ter, speleothems, sediments) as well as the bio- (d18O, d13C) are carried out on both precipi- logical ones (population densities, the evolution tated calcite and dripwaters. Radon concen- of biodiversity hot-spots, air microbiology) in trations are measured using both active and relation to the touristic traffic. The study should passive instruments. establish: (a) the extent to which the frequency The project will: (i) establish a robust and volume of the tourist traffic affects the mon- monitoring protocol to be applied to all itored parameters; (b) required measures to en- show and protected caves; (ii) establish sure a physico-chemical equilibrium of the cave threshold values for the tourist carrying ca- air and water and preserve cave’s attractions; (c) pacity such as to allow for the preservation limitations required in order to preserve cave of the subterranean environment; (iii) create biodiversity and to avoid the input of alloch- reliable technical solutions for monitoring tonous elements such as lampenflora; (d) identi- the cave environment, including remote fy potential health risks to both cave personnel monitoring and online data transfer; (iv) es- and tourists related to radon levels. tablish a set of basic principles to be en- 1CAVEMONITOR is a research project funded under the SEE financial mechanism with the number 17SEE/2014. The team consists of 24 researchers from the “Emil Racovita” Institute of Speleology in Bucharest and Cluj, the Uni- versity of Bergen (Norway), and the “Babes-Bolyai” University in Cluj. 66 Program and Abstracts—21st National Cave and Karst Management Symposium Fig.ure 1: Location of the monitored caves in Romania. tion of low-cost dataloggers that are function- forced by the management plans of show ing independently to each other. caves pending on their morphology or the A variety of sensors and dataloogers type of touristic traffic; (v) issue a set of available on the market have been tested for preventive measures and instructions to be their performance and robustness. In this re- followed by the personnel and stakeholders port we discuss the performance and difficul- of the show caves. ties related to different sensors and cave con- A total number of 35 monitoring sta- ditions as seen after 6 months of measure- tions have been installed in the 6 caves un- ments. We also present preliminary data der observation (Figure 1). We are using showing the influence of lighting regimes both automated fixed stations, where sen- and human traffic on the environment of the sors are connected to a central datalogger caves in different settings. and mobile stations consisting of a combina- 67 .
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