Revealing Long-Term Change in Vegetation Landscapes: The English Lake District and Beyond

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Ecological restoration and re-wilding are common practices in the management of landscapes. Both of these approaches aim to restore past landscapes and, in doing so, enhance biodiversity. Unfortunately, whilst we have a good understanding of what past landscapes looked like, we have little idea of what the species were that inhabited those landscapes. Botanical surveys using modern scientific approaches did not start until around the 1960s and prior to this data is in disparate and descriptive sources which pose many challenges for scientists to use. The lack of readily accessible data makes it difficult to make management decisions regarding how habitats should be conserved or restored. In this project we will bring together academics from landscape history, digital humanities, and botany and conservation to address this challenge. Using approaches from digital humanities we can access a wide range of sources that are not easily accessible to botanists. We will utilise a corpus of over 300 texts that we have already assembled. In a series of workshops we will explore the major challenges involved in using this data appropriately and communicating its information to academics and non-academics who are interested in the landscapes of the present and the future. Over the course of the network we will use the workshops to develop and shade a series of exemplars of our techniques in action focusing on a small number of species in the Lake District.Our first workshop will focus on how we can extract species names from historical texts in digital form. This workshop will bring experts in natural language processing (NLP) and digital humanities techniques together with landscape historians to explore and apply approaches such as NLP, geographical information systems (GIS) and qualitative spatial representation (QSR) to address some of the challenges faced in understanding what species there were, and where and when they were recorded. Location is a particularly challenging as we must be able to cope with and combine both place names and other types of information such as "...on the lower slopes above Borrowdale." Our second workshop will focus on integrating these sources into the modelling approaches used in modern botany. Historians and botanists very rarely work together so this will be an excellent opportunity to bridge this disciplinary divide. One key challenge will be data accuracy, the implications of the limited and fragmented nature of our sources, on the so called 'recorder effort.' The final workshop will focus on novel ways to communicate this data bringing together experts from a range of disciplines together with stakeholders such as planners and representatives of the heritage sector. The workshop will report on the findings from the previous two workshops and explore how data can be best communicated to those who will find it most useful. It will also develop an agenda for publication and future grant applications to further develop the network.