Many cavers in SFBC are involved with ongoing survey, exploration, and mapping projects. Opportunities are available locally, nationally, and internationally to work on long-term efforts to map, explore, restore, and find caves. In addition to standard rigging, vertical caving, horizontal caving, and climbing skills, there are exploration-based caving skills like survey, rigging, and ridgewalking. For local projects, very little background or experience is necessary to get started with these. Below are some links describing what some of these processes involve.
Derek Bristol Resources
Caving YouTuber, Derek Bristol, offers very comprehensive video tutorials on cave survey, cave cartography, cave rigging, and domestic and international caving projects.
Sketching and Surveying 101
Created in 2000. Cave survey technologies have advanced, but the general principles are the same and the info for sketching is still highly pertinent.
COMPASS Software
COMPASS is a cave mapping software package designed to edit, process, analyze and view cave survey data using any Windows-based computer. The programs in the system allow you to enter cave data, revise the data, generate statistics on the cave, close loops, view plots from any angle and finally, print finished quality plots on almost any printer or plotter.