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Gerald Moni's Mexican Cave Survey

For some years Gerald Moni maintained a Mexican Cave Survey. The effort ended about the middle of the first decade of this century. The data have been given to the the Association for Mexican Cave Studies.

The bulk of the MCS data are on several thousand pages of information about the caves, arranged by state and then alphabetically by cave name. The material on each cave typically includes a cave-report form, a location in degrees, minutes, and seconds, a photocopy of a part of a topographic map with the location marked, a more or less brief description of the cave, the information source, and a photocopy of a published map if one was available. The report form also has miscellaneous data such as length and depth, as well as other things in the description of the data fields mentioned below. This material has been preserved in the binders in which it was received, but it has not been cataloged as individual items in the AMCS paper archives. All published maps found in it are present in the collection of Mexican cave maps on the AMCS web site, however.

We also received a .csv (comma-separated values) file of the database for the survey. This has been converted to .xls (Microsoft Excel) and .numbers (Mac) versions. Some paper documents, such as an alphabetical list of cave names, have been placed in the AMCS paper archives.

Versions of the data file without the latitude and longitude location fields have been prepared for our web site. The database contains 2302 rows for caves and about 500 additional rows for alternate entrances or comments.

Mexican Cave Survey .csv file

Mexican Cave Survey .xls file

Mexican Cave Survey .numbers file

Mexican Cave Survey printout .pdf file

The PDF printout has the rows sorted first by a two-letter state code and then alphabetically by cave name. MCS numbers are assigned alphabetically to the caves in each state. The documented format of the original 80-column IBM-card format for the data, including codes used in various fields, will help in interpreting the fields in the spreadsheet. This PDF gives the names of the Mexican topographic maps, which are listed in the database by number.

An alphabetical list of cave names, with state codes and MCS numbers, as of August 2002 has been scanned to this PDF.

Data from the paper file on a cave or its coordinate location may be requested from the AMCS.