21st National Cave and Karst Management Symposium
National Cave and Karst Management Symposium October 19-23, 2015
Cave City, Kentucky
The 21st Annual National Cave and Karst Management Symposium will be held in the heart of the southcentral Kentucky karst in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky. The venue for NCKMS 2015 is the Cave City Convention Center located in Cave City, Kentucky situated just minutes of off Interstate I-65 and convenient to the international airports of Nashville, Tennessee ( 1.5 hours to the south) and Louisville, Kentucky (1.5 hours to the north). Since the early 1800s, Cave City has hosted visitors to Mammoth Cave National Park which is a World Heritage Site , International Biosphere Reserve, and the second oldest tourist attraction in the United States with 53,000 acres of natural preserve and over 400 miles of mapped passageways: the longest cave system in the world. The Symposium is hosted by Cave Research Foundation, Mammoth Cave National Park, and Western Kentucky University.
The theme of NCKMS 2015 is “Hidden Landscapes-Hidden Challenges”. Field trips will visit the surface and hidden landscapes of Mammoth Cave National Park and surrounding areas and will also feature field trips to Bowling Green, Kentucky to show the challenges of urban development on karst.
A selection of 7 outstanding workshops will be offered on Monday, October 19, 2015. The workshops will provide hands-on experiences with the resources necessary for studying, monitoring and managing cave systems and karst areas. The week after NCKMS 2015, Mammoth Cave and WKU’s Karst Field Studies Program will be offering a week-long course on cave management (October 26-30, 2015). The course can be taken as a workshop, for university credit (either graduate or undergraduate), or for Continuing Education credits.
We are now accepting papers for NCKMS 2015. The theme for the Symposium is "Hidden Landscapes – Hidden Challenges", with particular emphasis on management issues related to human impact on karst. However, we encourage oral presentations and/ or poster submissions on all topics related to the management of caves and karst resources. The deadline for paper submission is September 7, 2015. Visit our website for more information on the Call for Papers.
For more information on NCKMS 2015 please visit our website at www.cave-research.org/NCKMS2015 or contact Pat Kambesis (pat.kambesis@wku.edu)