For the caves, and the
people who look after them.
KEEP catalogs cave locations, trip reports, survey data, and scanned maps from cavers and grottos across the country. Edits are claims, not overwrites. Nothing is silently lost.
KEEP is a geospatial cave research database for the US caving community — grottos, survey teams, and regional organizations. It combines a claim-based data model with 20+ map layers to catalog and protect cave locations with scoped access control.
Records are never silently overwritten. Every edit is a versioned claim attached to a source. Sensitive coordinates stay hidden until access is explicitly granted.
Getting Started
Requests are reviewed manually by an area trustee.
Karst mapping
Overlay karst geology, DEM hillshade, LiDAR bare-earth, and public land boundaries on a single map. Import GPX or KML.
Access control
Strictly private, contributed, or public. Access is reviewed and granted by area trustees, not assumed.
Document archive
Upload old grotto newsletters and survey reports. KEEP extracts structured records. You review before anything is filed.
Survey data
Import Compass or Walls survey data, or align a scanned line plot over topo. Line work stays attached to the record.
Community
Trip reports, project pages, and a directory of cavers you've been underground with. Coordinate a resurvey or leave a visit log.
Sensitive site protection
Coordinates stay hidden until access is explicitly granted. Nothing silently leaks. The record exists; the location does not render.
KEEP grew out of a plain frustration. Cavers doing real work in the field had nowhere reasonable to put it. Survey teams duplicated effort because there was no way to know who else was working where. Grottos dissolved and took decades of records with them. The knowledge existed. It just had no home that would outlast the people who collected it.
The fix wasn't another read-only archive. It was a working platform: somewhere grottos meet, survey teams coordinate, regional leads steward their areas, and fieldwork gets preserved in a form the next generation can use.
Community first
Every design call starts with: does this serve cavers? The platform exists to make field cavers more effective, not to be impressive.
Privacy by design
Sensitive locations are protected at the data model, not as an afterthought. Access is scoped, audited, and revocable. You control what you share and with whom.
Honest about limits
Automatically extracted data stays flagged as unverified until a human signs off. Every claim carries its source, author, and date. No pretending the data is better than it is.
No commercial agenda
No freemium tier withholding features you need. The goal is a better-documented cave resource for the US. That is the entire plan.
Questions, feedback, grotto onboarding, or curiosity. Send a message and it goes directly to the trustee inbox.