Call for Papers Home

Survey and Cartography Section
2006 NSS Convention
August 7-11, 2006 -- Bellingham, Washington

This is a call for papers for the Survey and Cartography session at the 2006 NSS Convention. The session provides a good way to tell other cave mappers what you are doing, and to discuss problems related to mapping and cave surveying. Most cave surveyors have either developed useful techniques that may benefit others, or are encountering problems that someone else may have solved. In either case an informal session presentation would be appropriate.

The session is informal and the audience is friendly. There are no requirements to provide fancy visual aids or to provide a written paper (other than an abstract to include in the Convention Program). Of course, the Compass & Tape Editor would be glad to receive any written papers for publication. p>Presentations can be on any topic related to any aspect of cave mapping, and the material can be for folks with any level of mapping experience. A partial list of potential presentation topics includes:

• How to keep cave mud off your survey instruments (while still going into the cave)
• How to resolve blunders without another trip to the cave
• Large project management (personnel, survey standards, data processing, etc.).
• New tools, toys, or software to aid in mapping or cartography
• Demonstrations of techniques for improving efficiency when using map drawing software.
• Comparison of various programs for survey processing, map drawing, and data visualization.
• Integrating cave survey data with surface and GIS data.

The above list is obviously incomplete. If you are doing something that you think would be of interest to other cave surveyors, please consider doing a presentation on it.

When you submit your abstract, please let the session coordinator, Nigel Dyson-Hudson, know what equipment you will need for your presentation. You can assume that the usual 35mm slide projector, overhead projector, and digital projector will be available. You will need to supply a laptop computer if you need one. Other equipment may be available if you request it well ahead of time.

If you plan to do a presentation, you should send an abstract of not over 250 words to the session coordinator, Nigel Dyson-Hudson, so he can set up the session schedule and insure that the abstract gets into the Convention Program. Please be sure that your abstract includes a summary of your conclusions and results, not just a statement of what you are going to talk about. E-mail submissions of abstracts is strongly encouraged, but any legible format is quite acceptable. Nigel's address is 10 Slators Ln, Newfield NY 14867 and his e-mail address is ndh@internetsmiths.com.

The deadline for receiving abstracts has not been set by the Convention staff, but it will probably be June 15 2006. Check the convention's web site www.nss2006.com for more information about the convention.