Cave Management Planning
Introducing the WCC’s Stewardship Committee
by Joel Despain
Published: Winter, 2005

While buying caves is a very complex and time-consuming process, good stewardship of caves that we own or manage will be the long-term goal for the Western Cave Conservancy. This work will last indefinitely. It is the task of the newly active Stewardship Committee to take on planning and preparation for the management of caves.

Luckily, we do not have to reinvent the wheel. Rather, we can borrow from those who have gone before us in both the private and public sectors. Consistently, cave managers and management organizations have turned to written plans for organizing the steward-ship of a cave or preserve. Such plans provide many advantages: the planning process encourages careful consideration of how a property should be managed, responsibilities are clearly defined - important in a volunteer organization - and written policies are clear and available for everyone to see.

In general, most plans will include a few key sections, such as:

• A background introduction (brief accounts of the property’s geography, the native vegetation, the history of a cave and property including caver use, the site’s key or unusual resources).
• Management policies for the cave and above ground areas of a preserve (designation of closed areas or boots-off sections in the cave, burn bans on the surface, trails in the cave and on the surface).
• An access policy for the cave and surface of the preserve (who gets to go there, when, and how do they do so - keys, paperwork, etc).
• Infrastructure (information board, cave gates, outhouses or restrooms, demolition of derelict structures).
• Provisions for special concerns and needs (bat colonies, endemic life, rare plants, neighbor relations).
• Emergency and safety plans.
• Responsibilities (providing for regular property visitation by stewards for purposes of maintenance and security, such as fence and road upkeep).
• Procedures for changing the plan in the future or for reviewing its provisions (it may be that each property will have an annual planning meeting to review the success of ongoing management).

Creating a final written plan for a cave and preserve will take time - likely as long as a year. An interim plan will have to be put into place as soon as the WCC acquires a cave to allow for immediate access and use. Other actions on a property that the WCC may need to undertake immediately before a plan is completed may include overlooked maintenance, such as trash removal, building maintenance, and culvert repair.

Creating the final plan will include several phases:

1. Initial identification of issues, key resources, historic caver use, and other concerns will be completed by the Stewardship Committee staff and involved cavers who know the particular cave and property.
2. WCC members, neighbors, cavers, and members of National Speleological Society (NSS) grottos will then be consulted for their opinions on management concerns and issues. This may be done through WCC presentations at Grotto meetings.
3. The final plan will be written by a person or group of people assigned by the Stewardship Committee. It is likely that multiple authors will be used, with, for example, one person writing the history of the cave, another developing the access policy based upon caver comments, while a third develops policies for taking care of buildings and fences. The Committee will strive to find plan authors who know their respective discipline and/or the cave. The plan will likely go through multiple revisions.
4. The WCC Board of Directors will approve that plan.
5. The plan will be implemented. The planning process will be time consuming, particularly for our first properties. However, patience will pay off with a good plan that most everyone can at least tolerate and that hopefully most Western cavers will fully support. Within a few years the difficult decision making process will be behind us and WCC staff and cavers will fall into a routine of good cave and property management that will allow for caving fun and resource protection for generations to come.