Community

A working platform for cavers.

Most cave databases are read-only archives. The KEEP is where your grotto meets, your survey team coordinates, and your region keeps its records.

Your organization, your way.

Create a group for your grotto, survey team, regional committee, or any other organization. Group types are fully custom — name it whatever makes sense for your community. Members can share documents, coordinate trips, and manage events within the group.

Custom group types

Not limited to preset categories. Name your organization however your community uses — grotto, survey team, cave club, regional committee, or anything else.

Member management

Invite by email, approve join requests, assign member roles within the group. Each group controls its own membership independently.

Member-only document archive

Upload trip reports, survey files, and newsletters visible only to members. Documents can be shared across groups or kept strictly internal.

Group discussion board

Message board for coordination and announcements. Keep your group's conversation attached to your group's data — not scattered across email threads.

Collaborative workspaces for active survey work.

A Cave Project is a shared workspace for a specific cave or area. Link specific cave sites, upload files, coordinate trips, and communicate — all in one place.

Plan trips. Run events. Track attendance.

Trip Planning

Plan trips tied to a project or standalone. Set dates, meeting points, and participant caps. Link specific caves. Add GPS waypoints and area polygons. Log participants and build a record of who was there and when.

Group Events

Trips, training days, survey weekends, meetings, rescue drills, cleanup events. Registration and waitlists. Attendance tracking. Open to all members or invite-only — you decide per event.

Stay informed about your region.

Draw a polygon on the map defining your area of interest. If you have access to caves in that area, you'll get notified when new sites or updates appear within it — so you stay current on activity in your region without checking every day.

Alert zones are polygons you draw on the map — they don't have to follow county or state lines. Define exactly the area you care about. Alerts respect your access level: you only get notified about sites you can already see.

Find other cavers. Opt-in only.

The caver directory is opt-in. You choose whether you appear in it, and you control what information is visible. Only verified members can search it — the directory is never publicly indexed.

What you can share (all optional)
Name
NSS member number
Home region
Caving specialties
Experience level
Current projects and affiliations

Community-driven data quality.

Extracted data from documents gets flagged for community review before it's linked to site records. Members earn points for adding sites, uploading documents, and reviewing extractions. Leaderboards by region and grotto.

Review queue
AI-extracted data is always flagged before it's treated as confirmed — a human has to sign off.
Points system
Earn points for adding sites, uploading documents, reviewing extractions, and verifying data in the field.
Leaderboards
Regional and grotto leaderboards show who's contributing most to the community's data quality.

Decades of grotto newsletters, searchable.

Upload your grotto's back-catalog of newsletters as PDFs. Every cave reference is extracted and indexed — building a searchable archive of local knowledge going back decades. Results are attributed back to the original issue.

A cave mentioned in a 1978 grotto newsletter — a name, a depth, a brief description — gets extracted and linked to the site record. The original issue remains the source. Future members searching for that cave will find the reference, with attribution. Knowledge that would otherwise sit in a box in someone's garage becomes part of the permanent record.

What your grotto gets.

A permanent home for your trip reports and survey data
Member-only document archive
Trip and event coordination tools
Searchable newsletter archive
Access to 121 external cave databases

Ready to bring your grotto's data
into the 21st century?

Creating an account takes a minute. Access is granted after a brief review.

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Always free. No commercial agenda. Built for the caving community.