DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14535885
title: Pyroduct Digital Catalog

description: The world's largest morphological dataset of terrestrial lava tubes

The Pyroduct Digital Catalog (PDC) (currently version 2.0) is a first-of-its-kind database resulting from extensive bibliographical research undertaken by the authors and contributors, which contains more than 1200 digitized and manually retraced lava tube cross-sections from more than 94 lava tubes from around the world.

Countries: Italy, Spain (Canary Islands), Portugal (Azores), United States (Oregon, New Mexico, Hawaii), Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Australia

Inside the downloadable .zip and .rar files, a .dxf file and an explanatory .csv file are present, respectively the digitalized cross-sections and the explanatory .xlsx file, with all the bibliographical references and details for each lava tube in the catalog.



.dxf file: We categorized and organized the lava tube cross-sections in tables, divided by country and region. Within each table, the curve in the upper-left cell represents the first cross-section in the survey, while the one in the lower-right corner is the last. Each cell is 35mx35m.

.xlsx file: each table is labeled with the name of the lava tube and an identification code, which helps the user identify the cave in the .csv file of the database. Each unique code follows this format:


Initials of the country. Initials of the region. progressive number

Example: IT.SIC.04 (Italy.Sicily.lava tube n.04)The explanatory .csv file is organized as follows: each row represents a lava tube, and the nine columns contain all the information we were able to gather (see Table 1).

Recommended citations:When using the Pyroduct Catalog in your works, we kindly ask you to cite the dataset as follows:Romio, F. A. P., Lobosco, G., Marraffa, A., Pisani, L., & Tomasi, I. (2025). Pyroduct Digital Catalog (2.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.14535885

What's new in Version 2.0:



Catalog in .txt


The PDC is now also available in .txt format in the folder "Pyroduct Digital Catalog in .txt".Inside the folder, you can find the list of lava tubes available in PDC v2.0.Each folder contains individual .txt files of the lava tube's cross-sections, which can be imported into CAD, 3D modelling environments, or can be used for any kind of analysis.

The cross-sections are ordered in the same way they are ordered in the Pyroduct Digital Catalog.dxf file.For most of them, the order is the following:

From the entrance (main skylight) to the end of the cave.The entrance, for almost all the cases, was also the start point of the surveys from which the data was digitized.



New LiDAR-derived cross-sections added


In this release, we have added three collections of lava tubes' cross-sections derived from three different LiDAR Scans.

These caves are:

a) IT.SIC.09B Grotta di Monte Intraleo 2 (Romio et al., 2025);b) USA.CAL.00 Ship Cave (Bell et al., 2022);c) USA.CAL.01 Skull Cave (Bell et al., 2022).

Details regarding the reference papers/ datasets can be found in the "Pyroduct Digital Catalog Index v2.0.xlsx" attached.



Pyroduct Digital Catalog Index v2.0


The "Pyroduct Digital Catalog Index v2.0.xlsx" has been updated with the new entries.