Jewel Cave National Monument

Bats use one of the smaller cave entrances at Jewel Cave National Monument as a winter roost, and the Northern Great Plains Inventory & Monitoring Network is helping the park understand more about bat populations and activity patterns in the park using acoustic recorders. Monitoring helps protect the bat communities that live and forage in the park.

There's more to bat habitat than caves. Find out where the bats of Jewel Cave National Monument hang out!

Bats are amazing animals and a formidable force against insect pests, but a nasty fungal disease is killing them. A coordinated national response brings hope.

Enjoy a fun activity and learn about caves even when you can't get out to a park. In this activity you will build your own cave and learn how to make it like a "real" natural cave. Find out about cave formations and wildlife, and how to be safe and care for caves. New "Blanket Cave National Youth Parks" are springing up all across America! Join the fun!

Most Americans may not realize that their National Park caves lie at the forefront of on-going cave exploration. Some of the longest caves on Earth are managed and protected by the NPS. And all of these caves contain unexplored passages and rooms that cavers seek to find and document. These giant cave systems are the site of on-going work by cavers to explore, map, photograph and inventory the extent of National Park caves.

Across the US, changes in water availability are altering which plants grow where. These changes are evident at a broad scale. But not all areas experience the same climate in the same way, even within the boundaries of a single national park. A new dataset gives park managers a valuable tool for understanding why vegetation has changed and how it might change in the future under different climate-change scenarios.

In 1952, Jan Conn and Jane Showacre became the first all female team to complete a technical rock climb of Devils Tower. Read about the account as written by Jan Conn and published in Applachia Magazine later that same year.

Pollinators play a crucial role in national park ecosystems and beyond. In the national parks, species inventories help managers know which pollinators are present, and in what abundance, to better understand the state of park ecosystems and make decisions about how to manage them. From 2024 to 2026, 17 parks across the country will be surveyed for bees and butterflies.