Caves and Karst of Küre Mountains National Park, Turkey

Author Biography

Ali Yamaç is a Turkish speleologist. He was born in 1957 and caving since 1976. Over those years, he had surveyed and explored hundreds of caves, some of which are Turkey's longest and deepest caves. He was the President of the Speleological Federation of Turkey during 2007-2009 and the President during the establishment of three different caving organizations. He was the leader of the team that had prepared the Cave Inventory of Turkey. In addition to his natural cave explorations, as a part of his artificial cave projects, he explored and surveyed numerous rock-cut dwellings and underground cities around different regions of Turkey. Starting with the underground structures of Hagia Sophia Church and Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, his artificial cave projects continue with underground structures inventory projects in Kayseri and Gaziantep provinces. Both projects had been accepted to UNESCO World Heritage Site, Tentative List. He had explored and surveyed several rock-cut settlements and churches within the “Euphrates River Cliff Settlements Project” and “Kura River – Ardahan Region Survey Project”. Ezgi Tok is a Turkish speleologist. Her research is focused on microbial life and the related components of cave environments. Since 2016, she explored several karstic caves all over Turkey to reveal the microbial diversity, the ecosystem functioning of microbial populations and their relation with the psychochemical conditions within the cave ecosystem. Her research also investigates the impact of surface atmospherical conditions on subsurface microclimate. The project she currently conducts is the first cave microbiology study in Turkey that comparatively examines caves from different climatic regions with different environmental conditions. She had been caving since 2009 and joined several national and international speleological expeditions in Turkey and foreign, such as the expedition Lion of Crete, the 2nd deepest cave in Greece, and the expedition of Keş and Çem sinkholes, the 6th and 10th deepest caves of Turkey, respectively. She had surveyed and mapped several caves of Turkey; among them İnsuyu Cave, which is the longest and Kocain Cave, which is the largest chamber of Turkey are especially important. She had also joined in artificial cave projects, the underground structures inventory projects in Kayseri and Gaziantep provinces.