Hazards, Prevention And Control Of Lampenflora In Tourist Caves

Tourist cave, an important tourist resource, has a great attraction for tourists with its feature of deep, serene, visionary and mysterious. Lighting system is installed in tourist caves to ensure tourists’safety and facilitate their viewing. However, lighting changes the cave environment and causes lampenflora to grow around the lamp.Lampenflora doesn’t belong to the native ecosystems of tourist caves. Their appearance will alter the original cave depositional environment and affect the cave landscape development; change the stalactites color and decrease the aesthetic value; damage cave landscape and decrease the stalactites hardness, then leading to fracture and collapse; change the native ecosystems and lifecycle of tourist caves. It goes against tourist cave sustainable development. Therefore, researches in lampenflora growth mechanism, prevention and control become a prerequisite for sustainable development of tourism caves.The paper obtains a basic understanding of lampenflora growth conditions, prevention and control based on related literature and field survey of some tourist caves.Lampenflora growth in tourist caves must meet the following conditions:(1) plant spores and seeds enter the tourist cave by external force;(2) there is light to support plant photosynthesis in tourist caves;(3) there are enough water and nutrients in tourist caves;(4) there should be appropriate temperature and carbon dioxide for lampenflora growth in tourist caves.The following measures should be taken to prevent lampenflora growth in newly developed tourist caves which have no lampenflora:(1) control the entrance of plant spores and seeds into the tourist cave;(2) clean litter and soil on a regular basis in tourist caves to reduce nutrients needed by lampenflora growth;(3) improve the spectrum, illumination intensity and reduce the light duration to inhibit or kill the lampenflora.For tourist caves where lampenflora have grew, physical control, chemical control or other new technology methods should be used. Physical methods include uprooting and using UV irradiation to eliminate lampenflora; chemical control is spraying chemical reagents on lampenflora, such as formaldehyde, herbicides, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, hydrogen peroxide, bleach(sodium hypochlorite) and so on, or cleaning lampenflora by diluted chemical solution. There are also other methods which employ new techniques, such as nano-Ti02photocatalytic oxidation technology to control lampenflora.