KWI Karst Award
The Karst Award is an award given annually to an outstanding member of the cave and karst field.
Karst Award winner for 2012
Jim Goodbar
The 2012 KWI Karst Award banquet will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the evening of March 3, 2012,on the University of New Mexico campus in the Science and Mathematics building. This year’s honoree is Jim Goodbar, and he will speak on the topic of “There and Back Again (well not quite): A Cavers Tale.”
Jim began caving at 9 years old with his parents and two sisters in central Texas where the “bug” bit him and he was infected with a lifelong desire to explore, understand, and protect underground resources. Much of his 32+ year career with the Bureau of Land Management has been developing their national Cave and Karst Management Program where he currently serves as the Senior Cave and Karst Specialist for the Washington Office. He assisted in writing the Federal Cave Resources Protection Act, their regulations, and implementation procedures and was instrumental in developing their national cave and karst management policies, manual and handbook, cave management training courses, national and local agreements, national cave safety standards, and guidelines for oil & gas drilling in karst areas. Jim is an Honorary Life Member, Fellow, and past board member of the National Speleological Society, a Fellow of the Cave Research Foundation, and a Charter Life Member of the American Cave Conservation Association. His interests, education, and career have led him into all aspects of cave exploration, science, and karst management. Caving and cave management have taken Jim to 16 foreign countries. Jim has authored over 25 publications on cave and karst management and geology. He earned his BS in Park and Recreation Management from Texas A&M University and conducted his graduate studies in Cave/Karst Geology/Geomorphology at Western Kentucky University in 1979-81.
William “Bill” K. Jones: Winner for 2011
The 2011 KWI Annual Awards Banquet was held in Warm Springs, Virginia, to honor Bill. Bill is the current Chairman of the Board of Directors for KWI, and has served continuously on the KWI Board since it inception. Bill holds a BSF degree in Forest Management from West Virginia University and an MS degree in Environmental Science (Hydrology) from the University of Virginia. He was an adjunct professor of hydrology at the American University, Washington, D.C. He is a Fellow of the National Speleological Society. He studies physical hydrology of surface and ground-water resources with an emphasis on areas underlain by carbonate (karst) aquifers. He has studied karst areas across North America, France, Eastern Europe, China and Southeast Asia. Bill is the author of over twenty papers on karst hydrology and water tracing. He is the author of the "Karst Hydrology Atlas of West Virginia" (1997) and served as the guest editor for a special issue of the National Speleological Society Bulletin on water tracing using fluorescent tracers (1984). He wrote the chapter on water tracing for the Encyclopedia of Caves (2005). He is the first author of Recommendations and Guidelines for Managing Caves on Protected Lands (2003), prepared for the U.S. Department of the Interior. He is a consultant to the US Army Environmental Center on the remediation of hazardous wastes in karst aquifers on military bases. He also studies ground-water movement in fractured aquifers and statistical characterization of water resources. Current research projects include the problems of instrumenting small catchments for measuring precipitation and flows for water balance studies. He and his wife, Lee Elliott, reside in Chimney Run Farm in Bath County, Virginia, where he runs his own hydrology consulting firm, Environmental Data.
Dr. William R. Jeffery: Winner for 2010
The 2010 KWI karst award went to Professor William R. Jeffery of the University of Maryland, College Park. Professor Jeffery is the world's expert on the developmental and evolutionary genetics of the Mexican Cave Tetra, Astyanax mexicanus. He has authored numerous scholarly papers on this fish, including a synthesis and summary published in 2009 in the Annual Review of Genetics. His work is the most convincing evidence that loss of eyes is the result of selection and not from some random process. His enthusiasm and well-earned success in genetic and experimental manipulation of this fish have led a generation of young researchers to take up Astyanax as a model system for studying eye loss and evolution in general. A past president of the Society for Developmental Biology, he is also an avid caver, a life member of the National Speleological Society, owner of Henpeck Mill Cave in Tennessee, and a founding member of the D.C. Biospeleology Discussion Club.
Dr. Janet Herman: Winner for 2009
The 2009 award dinner was held to honor Dr. Janet Herman from the University of Virginia. The dinner was held at the Homestead Preserve "Old Dairy Barn," Warm Springs, Virginia. Dr. Herman received her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. Her general research interests focus on low-temperature aqueous geochemistry, whereby she studies problems in water-rock interactions, kinetics of geochemical reactions, and the evolution of groundwater chemistry in various hydrogeological environments, including caves and karst. She is the past recipient of the Association for Women Geoscientists Outstanding Educator Award, and the Geological Society of America Hydrology Division's Distinguished Service Award.
Dr. Tom Kunz: Winner for 2008
The 2008 award dinner of the Karst Waters Institute in honor of Dr. Tom Kunz was held in Cobleskill, New York. Dr. Kunz is a Professor of Biology and the Director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, where he has been on the faculty since 1971. He received a BA in Biology and MA in Education from the University of Central Missouri, a MA in Biology from Drake University, and a Ph.D. in Systematics and Ecology from the University of Kansas. His research focuses on the ecology, behavior, evolution, and conservation biology of bats. At the time of the award, he authored or co-authored more than 240 publications and is the editor or co-editor of numerous books, including the 2nd edition of Ecological and Behavioral Methods for the Study of Bats (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Past-President of the American Society of Mammalogists, and a recipient of the Gerrit S. Miller Jr. Award for outstanding research on bats and the C. Hart Merriam Award for outstanding contributions to the discipline of mammalogy. In addition to the Karst Award in 2008, he was elected to honorary membership in the American Society of Mammalogists (the highest award given by the society). He has conducted field research in mid-western, northeastern and southwestern regions of the United States, and in India, Malaysia, Ecuador, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Costa Rica.
Dr. Tadej Slabe: Winner for 2007
The 2007 award dinner of the Karst Waters Institute was held in honor of Dr. Tadej Slabe in Postojna, Slovenia. Dr. Slabe is the Head of the Institute of Karst Research Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Under his leadership, the Karst Research Institute has become a true international center for karst research and education, through the development of numerous bilateral programs with other countries and.the growth of the annual Karstology School. His research area is the geomorpholoogy of karst, and he has pursued this research not only in the Dinaric karst, but also in Spain, France, Iran, Japan and China.
Ronal Kerbo: Winner for 2006
The 2006 award dinner of the Karst Waters Institute in honor of Ronal Kerbo was held in Lafayette, Colorado. Mr. Kerbo retired from the National Park Service after 31 years. At the time of his retirement, he was the Service's national cave and karst program coordinator and the acting director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute. Currently, an adjunct professor at Red Rocks Community College in Lakewood, Colorado, teaching a course titled “The Geology and Evolution of Caves.” Among many other speleological associations, he is an Honorary Life Member and a Fellow of the National Speleological Society; a Fellow of the Cave Research Foundation; a former director and now honorary director of the American Cave Conservation Association and a former board member of the Karst Waters Institute.
Dr. Nicholas C. Crawford: Winner for 2005
The 2005 award dinner of the Karst Waters Institute in honor of Dr. Nicholas C. Crawford was held at the Cave Research Foundation headquarters in Hamilton Valley, Kentucky. Dr. Crawford is a professor of Geology in the Department of Geography and Geology at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He founded the Center for Cave and Karst Studies within the Applied Research and Technology Program at Western Kentucky University. More than a thousand students from around the country, including many or today’s top practicing karst scientists, have taken courses in the WKU Karst Field Studies Program. Dr. Crawford has over twenty-five years of educational and research accomplishments in the field of cave and karst science. At the time of the award, he had authored more than 200 technical reports dealing primarily with ground-water contamination of karst aquifers.
Dr. Arthur N. Palmer: Winner for 2004
The 2004 award dinner of the Karst Waters Institute was held in Oneonta, New York, in honor of Dr. Arthur N. Palmer. Dr. Palmer is a Professor Emeritus of Hydrology and Geochemistry at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oneonta. He is the former director of the Water Resources program at the school. His achievements in science and exploration of caves and karst include the National Speleological Society’s Science Award, as well as SUNY Chancellor’s Awards for teaching and research, and a Distinguished Teaching Professorship. He is a member of the Cave Research Foundation and British Cave Research Association, a fellow of the National Speleological Society and recipient of the Science Award, and a Certificate of Merit. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the recipient of a Kirk Bryan Award from the Geological Society of America for his benchmark paper on the origin and morphology of caves. At the time of the award, he authored over 100 publications, including the 2007 book, Cave Geology. Art served many years on the board of directors and executive positions for the Karst Waters Institute.
Dr. Patty Jo Watson: Winner for 2003
The 2003 award dinner of the Karst Waters Institute was held in Charles Town, West Virginia, in honor of Dr. Patty Jo Watson. Dr. Watson is an archaeologist renowned for her work on Pre-Columbian Native Americans, especially in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky. She is now a Distinguished University Professor Emerita, Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, having retired in 2004 as the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of Archaeology at Washington University. She received her PhD. from the University of Chicago in 1959. She began her work in Salts Cave, Kentucky, a portion of the world's longest cave system in Mammoth Cave National Park, in the 1960's. The research developed into a long-term project on the agricultural origins in Eastern North America.
Dr. John R. Holsinger: Winner for 2002
The 2002 award dinner of the Karst Waters Institute in honor of Dr. John R. Holsinger was held at Highland Farm near Charles Town, West Virginia. In an age of increasing specialization, when scientists know more and more about less and less, John Holsinger knows more and more about more and more. A Professor of Biology at Old Dominion University, he was trained as a biologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, James Madison University, and the University of Kentucky, John is the premier subterranean amphipod taxonomist and systematist in the world. At the time of the award, he had discovered and described over 200 new species, most of which are rare and endangered. But he has done much more than that. An active caver for nearly 50 years, he is responsible for the discovery of more Virginia caves and the mapping of more Virginia caves than anyone else. His publication Descriptions of Virginia Caves in 1975 remains the definitive source of information about Virginia caves. John has long been concerned about environmental threats to caves and cave faunas, and he was largely responsible for the establishment of the Virginia Cave Board and the enactment of the Virginia Cave Law. He has been an inspiration to and leader of cave scientists and recreational cavers for many years. Dr. Holsinger was the thesis advisor for our second award honoree Dr. Jill Yager.
Dr. William B. White: Winner for 2001
The 2001 award dinner of the Karst Waters Institute in honor of Dr. William B. White was held at Smithfield Farm near Berryville, Virginia. Dr White developed an early interest in caves and karst and started serious caving with an undergraduate summer job at Lincoln Caverns in 1951. In the 1950s he conducted investigations of many caves in central Pennsylvania and the Greenbrier Valley in West Virginia and has continued world-wide karst research projects for fifty years. Dr. White frequently collaborates with his wife, Dr. Elizabeth L. White, on karst hydrology studies and has been the advisor to numerous graduate students working on karst related topics. At the time of the award, Dr. White authored of over 84 research papers and four books dealing with karst. He was one of the first researchers in the United States to directly apply the laws of chemistry and physics to explain many of the seemingly mysterious characteristics of karst landforms. His papers on karst related topics cover a remarkably diverse range of specialties including geomorphic studies of karst drainage basins, hydraulics of water flow through limestone caves, kinetics of carbonate dissolution, transport of sediments through caves, and the mineralogy of cave formations (speleothems). He is now retired from his dual appointment in the Department of Geosciences and in the Materials Research Laboratory at The Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Jill Yager: Winner for 2000
The annual Karst Waters Institute Award Dinner was held in Charles Town, West Virginia, to honor Dr. Jill Yager. Dr. Yager has been exploring and studying submerged caves for over 20 years. She began cave diving in the Bahamas where she discovered a new class of crustacean which she named the Remipedia. She studied remipedes for her doctoral dissertation under Professor John Holsinger at Old Dominion University. Her research deals with the ecology of submerged caves, studying the physical environment and community of animals that live there. Her research has taken her to the beautiful and highly endangered caves in Quintana Roo, Mexico, and sites throughout the Carribean. Dr. Yager has appeared in several educational television programs. In August she and cave biologist Abel Perez were filmed in Cuba for a new National Geographic television program called "Sea Secrets." At the time of the award, Dr. Yager was an associate professor in the Environmental and Biological Sciences Department of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Dr. Derek Ford: Winner for 1999
The first annual Karst Awards Dinner was held in Charles Town, West Virginia, to honor Dr. Derek Ford. Throughout his career, Dr. Ford has expanded the frontiers of karst science and published a rich body of research furthering the understanding of speleogenesis, karst geomorphology, geochronology, paleokarst, paleoclimate, and other karst processes and phenomena. At the time of the award, Dr. Ford had recently retired from McMaster University and received the rank of Professor Emeritus. His tenure at McMaster University included the supervision of the graduate programs of numerous students who have gone on to become prominent karst scientists.