Things to do in a Pandemic (Part 2)
Following on from Things to do in a Pandemic (part 1) another area I have been working on over the past >2 years are updates of the survey repository.
- New Surveys (on this site)
- Cave Registry Archive (the Andara dataset)
In 1996, when I first went out to Tresviso with LUSS, we had no real information on the caves other than the LUSS journals and a few tattered A4 sheets of French descriptions (the LSD group from 1981). Luckily, we were only concentrating on one cave, that had been surveyed on the same expedition.
Future work was not really considered beyond tentative ideas to come back and hammer away at the same restriction year after year. Contact with older LUSS members, from the original expeditions was limited, and the club only managed a few more years before it’s demise, This was before the start of CHECC and the new LUSS club
After a quick visit in 2005, with SWCC, I started to consider the possibility or restarting the expeditions in some form. A few years were spent revisiting the same cave from 1996 and finally extending it but eventually thoughts turned to the bigger caves and the wider area.
Post 1996 we had set up a website and dumped most information onto it, including a lot of revised surveys, redrawn by ourselves and the software packages available at the time. This was 1997, smartphones, laptops, youtube, tiktok and memes were a long way off……
By 2011 we were re-exploring and re-rigging Cueva del Nacimiento and it quickly became apparent that we needed to start bringing the surveys into the 21st Century. The first problem was the total lack of raw data from the original expeditions, so initially the original old surveys were ‘digitised’, taking a compasss and protractor and recreating the data. Later some original data did turn up and was incorporated but a lot of the original exploration remains digitised, until we return to the specific caves and re-survey.
Everything was originally put into OnStation, but later into Survex and a model of the whole area was slowly built up. Surveys were redrawn in Illustrator, which soon gave way to Therion. All records were moved from paper, to excel, to access, and finally to the current database, and at each step the data was reviewed and refined.
The evolving Sara survey
In the past year the various sources of data have been consolidated, with the database (available online) becoming the ‘one source of (part) truth’. This then is used in QGIS to plot and model various pictures of the area. Surveys in the field are drawn with Topodroid and then finished with Therion.
