Abstract
Monitoring microclimatic conditions in underground environments is crucial for understanding chemical and biological processes occurring in caves and their effect on archaeological, palaeontological, and palaeobotanical records. The Israel Cave Climate Project (ICCP) dataset provides high-resolution microclimatic data from twelve caves across three climate zones — Desert, Steppe, and Mediterranean — measured during 2019–2021 using a uniform protocol. All twelve are natural karstic caves containing diverse, rich, and typically multi-period archaeological records. Within each cave, hourly air temperature and relative humidity measurements were recorded over a year, and these data are presented here in full. The physical and speleological characteristics of the studied caves and the content and nature of their archaeological records are also detailed. The combined high-resolution datasets, incorporating speleological, climatological, and archaeological records, provide unparalleled raw data valuable for studying cave environments, particularly cave archaeology, site formation processes, and preservation and conservation of ancient material and bioarchaeological records.
Data availability
The dataset is available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.17505739)51.
Code availability
While the netCDF data file51 can be operated and managed in any suitable software, we also offer the Shiny-based ICCP package built for R v. 4.5.2, that we wrote to overview the data file along with the comparative CHELSA data. The code is open-source and can be found either on Zenodo51, or GitHub repository.
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Acknowledgements
Illustrations 1 and 3 were made by Aya Marck. Archaeological finds images used in Fig. 3 were photographed by Tal Rogovsky. Data loggers in Fig. 5 were photographed by Roee Shafir. This research was funded by an ERC‐stg grant (No. 802752 to N.M.) for the DEADSEA_ECO Project (https://sites.google.com/view/deadsea-eco/home). Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
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Micka Ullman – field data collection, wrote the manuscript. Mitya Kletzerman – data analysis and curation, wrote the manuscript. Asaf Oron – field data collection. Roi Porat – field data collection. Boaz Langford – field data collection. Amos Frumkin – annotator. Yitzchak Jaffe – data validation, annotator. Uri Davidovich – project director. Nimrod Marom – project director, funding.
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Ullman, M., Kletzerman, M., Oron, A. et al. Year-round hourly temperature and humidity sensor readings from arid caves, Judean Desert, Israel.
Sci Data (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06420-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06420-8
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