Overview

The Israel Cave Climate Project (ICCP) dataset provides high‐resolution microclimatic observations from twelve karstic caves spanning three distinct climate zones in Israel: Desert, Steppe, and Mediterranean. Within every cave, hourly air temperature and relative humidity were logged continuously for approximately one year. Several loggers were set in different light zones in each cave (42—in total). All measurements were collected using an identical protocol between 2019 and 2021. Each of these twelve caves contains diverse archaeological records.

The repository is organized into three ZIPs:

• ICCP_data: contains the primary NetCDF file (israel_caves-2025.nc) with all microclimate data and associated metadata.
• ICCP_images: high‐resolution photographs of each cave interior as well as cave maps showing logger placements.
• ICCP_application: a Shiny‐based R application that can be run locally to explore, visualize, and export subsets of the data. The application was built as a package under R v. 4.5.2 (R Core Team, 2025) and passed the check with devtools R package (Wickham et al., 2025). It includes all source code, documentation, and example workflows for loading and plotting the NetCDF file. The application does also have a repository at the GitHub. Additionally, it includes mean daily temperature and precipitation for each cave location, derived from the CHELSA (Climatologies at High Resolution for the Earth’s Land Surface Areas) project (Karger et al., 2017; 2021). These CHELSA data were retrieved using the Rchelsa R package (Karger, 2023). At the time of submission, precipitation data from 2021 onward were not yet fully available; updated data can be obtained either by downloading the latest CHELSA files directly or by using the get_CHELSA() function included in the ICCP application.
  
  

Version 1.1 vs 1.0:

• Data plotting bugs have been fixed
• Cave namings and list of findings and occupation periods have been updated

Installation and usage

The NetCDF data file can be investigated independently or within the ICCP application. To run the application, install R and RStudio. Download and unzip the application on your computer and run ICCP.Rproj. Then run these code lines:

if (!requireNamespace("devtools", quietly = T)) install.packages("devtools")

library(devtools)

load_all()

iccp()