A geospatial cave research database built by cavers, for cavers. Catalog, protect, and share cave data with the right people — from your grotto members to regional survey teams to the NSS.
Always free. No commercial agenda. Built for the community.
Cave data has always lived in spreadsheets, personal hard drives, grotto filing cabinets, and websites that go down when someone stops paying the hosting bill. The KEEP is the answer to that — a permanent, organized, access-controlled home for US cave and karst data.
20+ layers including USGS topos, vintage quads, karst geology, LiDAR hillshade, land ownership, and state karst GIS data. Overlay your own GPX tracks. Draw areas of interest.
Upload PDFs, trip reports, survey bulletins, GPX files, shapefiles, scanned maps. The system reads them, extracts every cave mention, and links the data to the right site.
Type "caves deeper than 200ft in Eddy County" and get results. No learning a query syntax — just describe what you're looking for.
Install it on your phone as a PWA. Sites, PDFs, and photos cache locally. Log observations at the entrance with GPS autofill. Syncs when you're back in range.
12 genesis types, 20 passage morphologies, 22 surface feature types, and 30+ condition flags across access, hazard, and verification categories. UIS and ASTM D8512-23 aligned.
CSV, KML, KMZ, GPX, GeoJSON, PDF field cards, Compass .dat, Walls .srv. Every export is scoped to your access level and watermarked.
Cave locations are sensitive. The KEEP was designed from day one around the idea that access is earned, not assumed. Every site has its own visibility level. Every user has a defined scope of what they can see and do.
Sees all sites and documents within their assigned territory. Reviews claims and data quality for their region.
Access defined by a drawn polygon — not state lines. Manages data quality within their approved area.
Sees show caves, sites they created, and sites shared with them through groups or explicit grants. Can suggest edits to sites they can view.
Can browse public information. Sensitive cave locations are not visible until the account has been reviewed and approved.
Beyond roles: per-site visibility levels (public, logged-in, private, admin-only) · geographic access zones drawn as polygons · group-based document sharing · explicit per-site grants with optional expiration · custom roles with 11 granular permissions.
When you enter a cave or upload a document, The KEEP cross-references it against 121 external databases, every uploaded document, and every existing site record — automatically. Different name, slightly different coordinates? It still finds the match.
Enter a cave name and coordinates, upload a PDF trip report, import a GPX track, or drop in a scanned survey map.
Fuzzy name matching, proximity search, and automated confirmation finds connections across sources. "Bear Hollow Cave" matches "Bear Hollow Cavern."
Every source that mentions the site — linked. Depth from a 1987 newsletter. Coordinates from a 2003 USGS report. Your 2024 GPS reading. All together.
Nothing gets overwritten. Every claim keeps its source, author, and date. The full history is always there.
Your grotto meets here. Your survey team coordinates here. Your region keeps its records here — with grottos, custom group types, cave projects, events, discovery alerts, and a community directory that's yours to control.
Track landowner contacts, permission status, and lease expiration per site. Attach rescue anchor inventories, rigging notes, and emergency contacts to any cave — accessible offline in the field.
Grottos and survey teams can now create events — trips, training days, survey weekends, cleanup events — with registration, waitlists, and attendance tracking.
Every automatically extracted field now carries a confidence score. Low-confidence extractions are flagged for community review before being linked to site records.
Creating an account takes a minute. Access is granted after a brief review.
Always free. No commercial agenda. Built for the caving community.