Karst Conservancy of Illinois Current Projects
Twin Culvert Cave Nature Preserve
We're proud to be able to help out The Nature Conservancy by caring for this unique Pike County, Illinois property.
Current Activities:
- Cave Clenup
- Surface Cleanup
- Managing seasonal cave closure
- Bioinventory
Pautler Nature Preserve
The largest project taken on by the organization to date has been Pautler Cave Nature Preserve, located in Monroe Co. Efforts of the conservancy have resulted in the purchase of the cave entrance, and, even more importantly, the dedication of the surrounding three acres of wooded land as an Illinois Nature Preserve.
Current activities in Pautler Cave include:
- Cave gate maintenance (under the direction of Don Coons)
- Cave survey (under the direction of Don Coons)
- The survey of Pautler Cave is still ongoing. If you are interested in participating, please contact Don Coons.
Survey work.
- Studies of manganese and other minerals by doctoral student Andrew J. Frierdich. See a poster (1353 kb pdf) he presented on his Pautler Cave work at a national meeting.
Andrew Frierdich takes a sample near the ceiling upstream from Pautler Falls for his dissertation research project. Photo (c) Ralph Sawyer October 2008.
- Inventory of cave springtails by Drs. Felipe Soto-Adames and Steve Taylor (Illinois Natural History Survey)
Dr. Felipe Soto-Adames lays out a quadrat in Pautler Cave as part of an on-going biological study. Photo by Steve Taylor.
- Annual monitoring of the Illinois Cave Amphipod by Dr. Julian J. Lewis
- Water quality monitoring by Barb Coons
- Speleothem dating in relation to the New Madrid Earthquake, by Same Panno (Illinois State Geological Survey) and others
- Panno, S.V., C.C. Lundstrom, K.C. Hackley, B.B. Curry, B.W. Fouke, and Z. Zhang. 2009. Major Earthquakes Recorded by Speleothems in Midwestern U.S. Caves. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 99(4):2147-2154. DOI: 10.1785/0120080261
- Photomonitoring (under the direction of Ralph Sawyer)
- Route flagging and stabilization (under the direction of Jeffery Gosnell)
- Recently completed molecular studies of the Illinois Cave Amphipod by Mike Venarsky (now a doctoral student studying caves at the University of Alabama and Dr. Frank Wilhelm (now at University of Idaho) also utilized Pautler Cave as one of their study sites
L. J. Tognetti (Near Normal Grotto), Dan Nelson, Dr. Frank Wilhelm (Univ. Idaho & Illinois Speleological Survey) look at critters at a pool between the entrance and Pautler Falls. Photo (c) Ralph Sawyer, November 2008.
Recent photos from work done at Pautler Cave:
The view looking up and out of the main sink entrance.
One of the formation areas of the cave.