WKU News & Events

November 21, 2001

WKU Graduate Student Receives
Award For Cave Research

Bowling Green, Ky. - A Western Kentucky University graduate student has received an award from the Cave Research Foundation for his cave-related thesis study.

Joel Despain of Three Rivers, Calif., received the foundation’s Karst Research Fellowship, which carries a stipend of $3,500, for his project at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park where he serves as cave specialist.

Only one fellowship was awarded nationally by the foundation during 2001. Despain has finished his graduate coursework at WKU and is completing his thesis research at a remote site high in the Sierras of central California.

Despain’s graduate research is focused on the carbon cycle and atmospheric carbon in cave and karst regions, in particular studying the geochemistry of carbon dioxide at an alpine karst site over 8,000 feet in elevation.

Since karst regions cover 12 percent of the Earth’s land surface, understanding the exchange of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and landscape is important for understanding the dynamics of the global atmospheric carbon cycle, according to Dr. Chris Groves, Despain’s adviser and director of the Hoffman Environmental Research Institute. This is in turn significant as rising CO2 levels are increasingly suspected to be associated with global climate change, Dr. Groves said.

Despain’s site is part of a developing global network of such cave monitoring sites, with Western Kentucky University working on others at Mammoth Cave and southern China.

Despain, who is participating in a specially-tailored master’s degree program for federal resource managers jointly supported by the National Park Service and WKU’s Hoffman Environmental Research Institute, will continue collecting data over the next year in Sequoia’s high elevation Mineral King Valley.

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