Flooding represents the most serious environmental threat to the UK today. It is a problem predicted to increase over the next few decades. The urgency with which collective responses must be found to this, and other climate-related challenges, is reflected in the recent shift in vocabulary: we no longer talk of a crisis but an emergency. Positive responses to the flood threat will require a unity of action between central government and local authorities, environmental agencies, academics, and the public. Key to future flood control will be the fundamental decisions now being taken over how the UK landscape can be best managed. Within many quarters there is a dawning realisation that if the country is to become more flood resilient, landscape change may have to be radical in conception and bold in undertaking. To be both practicable and deliverable, it is essential that the positive benefits deriving from new configurations of the landscape are communicated effectively to communities affected by change if the transition is not to be resisted and delayed. This Research Network, led by scholars from the Arts and Humanities, draws together those with interests in the historic and contemporary environment, with perspectives to offer on the past, present, and future shape of the British landscape and societal responses to flooding. This Network focuses, in the first instance, on those landscape decisions that are required to be taken to build greater flood resilience in England and Wales. Over time, the Network will look to broaden its remit to the whole of the UK and beyond. The Network aims to break down academic silos, and in particular collapse the Arts and Humanities-Science divide. Crucially, the Network will involve representatives from those agencies currently charged with building and delivering flood resilience across the country. It has the express ambition of contributing substantively to current discourse and debates surrounding the most appropriate and deliverable responses to the rising flood threat in the UK. In particular it looks to fully exploit the unique, and largely overlooked, contribution that Arts and Humanities readings of the long-term development of the British landscape and societal responses to flooding, might make in creating more flood resistant communities and landscapes into the future. Three questions, which can only be fully addressed through interdisciplinary treatment, have led to the creation of this Research Network and guide its agenda. First, can we or should we continue to rely on on hard engineered defences as the principal method for mitigating floods or should we be moving towards softer natural flood management strategies? Second, what lessons can be drawn from the ways in which communities have responded to flooding in the past and the land management practices they adopted to mitigate against floods: might these provide templates for the future? Thirdly, in recognising that landscape change will impact people's existing relationship with, and appreciation of, familiar landscapes, how, where, and in what ways might this required transformation be best and most sensitively achieved? The Network responds directly to those responsible for flood management and delivering these necessary landscape changes and what they desire from the academy in order to fill evidential gaps they have identified and which they want in order to enhance their current practice. It will establish a new research agenda in which Arts and Humanities research will play a central role in future proofing the UK landscape against the rising threat of flooding. Providing a research focus for the Network with the potential to deliver more immediate impact, the Network will work closely with the Environment Agency as they develop and deliver their plans for the future sustainable management of the low-lying, flood-protected landscape of Isle of Axholme in north Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.

Targeted management of the UK's fire prone landscapes will be crucial in enabling the country to achieve its commitments both to reach net zero by 2050 and to halt species decline by 2030. Many of our fire prone landscapes represent nationally significant carbon (C) stores. They also provide key habitats for unique species including many on the UK BAP Priority Species listing and are of strategic conservation value. But these typically shrub and grass dominated ecosystems are threatened both by the changing UK wildfire regime and some management tools aimed to mitigate this risk. Critical trade-offs therefore exist between the impact of episodic severe wildfire events and ongoing long term management practises, as well as between the positive and negative impacts of management tools on different prioritised ecosystem services; notably between C storage, habitat management and biodiversity provision. These trade-offs and the associated best management practises will vary between landscapes that have different management history, vegetation composition, legacy soil C stores and natural environmental conditions. Thus selection of the appropriate land management from the diverse toolkit available needs to be very carefully considered; the right tool to address the right priorities at the right location. The evidence base to make this complex choice, however, is currently weak. This undermines the ability of decision makers locally and nationally to assess the consequences of different wildfire management tools. IDEAL UK FIRE will address this urgent need, by determining the environmental costs and benefits of widely applied fuel management tools (burning, cutting, rewetting and managed succession) on habitat quality, biodiversity and the carbon balance in fire prone UK landscapes. We will directly contrast those medium-/long-term responses against the initial impact of the fuel management interventions and potential wildfires of varying severity. Through i) observations and collation of extensive historical monitoring, ii) experimental burns and wider management intervention and iii) the adaptation and application of the JULES land surface model, FlamMap fire analysis system and the Rangeshifter eco-evolutionary modelling platform, the project will: - Quantify carbon consumption and charcoal production across a range of (wild)fire and management intensities in different landscapes and under different land management strategies. - Determine the medium-term trajectories of biodiversity and carbon balance post intervention through a national chronosequence of management tools. - Develop next generation models to simulate the national long-term consequences of land management strategies to the UK ecosystem carbon balance, carbon climate feedbacks, habitat quality and biodiversity. We embed all this knowledge into a newly developed accredited training module for the land management sector. The module supports land managers to understand the consequences of different management tools, supporting them to make informed decisions in their landscapes to best meet both national and local management goals. The training programme will provide a generalisable frame-work to evaluate land management practices and a knowledge platform to inform government policy on the costs and benefits of wildfire management tools.

Human experiences are recorded and communicated mostly as text which are increasingly available as digital corpora. A major challenge for researchers in the social sciences, humanities and computer sciences is how to use these texts in interdisciplinary settings to develop cohesive understandings of the experiences described. Understanding geographies in textual sources has received a significant amount of research interest in recent years across fields as diverse as geographical information science (GISc), corpus linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), human geography, literary studies, and digital humanities. The current state of the art involves using geoparsing to automatically identify the place names in texts and allocate them to a coordinate (Grover et al 2010). Once georeferenced in this way, place names can be read into a geographical information system for mapping and spatial analysis. Analysis can also be conducted using techniques from corpus linguistics and NLP to see what words or themes are associated with the place name such as the place being associated with emotional responses such as being beautiful or inspiring fear. This combination of approaches is known as geographical text analysis (GTA) (Gregory et al 2015). While GTA provides a useful starting point for understanding the geographies within a corpus, it is highly quantitative, is limited to named places for which coordinates can be found, and has little concept of time. Yet, as narratives of journeys make abundantly clear, human experiences of geography are more often subjective and more suited to qualitative representation. In these cases, "geography" is not limited to named places; rather, it incorporates the vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, with references to, for example, "the camp", "the hills in the distance", or "further down the road", and includes the relative locations using terms such as "near to", "on the left", or "a few hours' journey" from. These qualitative representations are necessary contextual referents but cannot be managed within geospatial technologies such as GIS. To understand on a large scale the ways in which humans describe and relate to the world around them, then, we need to be able to visually represent and interpret the geographies authors describe in ways that combine the qualitative nature of described spatial experiences with methods that render them quantitatively analysable. Drawing on a strongly interdisciplinary team, this grant will develop approaches that allow us to identify, extract, visualise, and analyse qualitative and quantitative references to place and time. These methods will be applied to analyses of two large corpora: one a corpus of travel writing about the English Lake District, predominantly written in the 18th and 19th centuries; the other, a corpus of Holocaust survivor testimonies. Although based on very different types of journey - leisure travel and forced migration respectively - both corpora represent a collection of unique voices that coalesce to generate complex cultural and experiential geographies. The project will explore how cutting-edge digital technologies from NLP, corpus linguistics, Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (QSTR), GISc, and visual analytics can help us understand how authors themselves represented the geographies that surrounded them and explore the individual and aggregate representation of the sense and experience of place that these texts contain. The resulting applications will have great significance for scholarly and non-academic audiences alike.

SUMMARY This project seeks to use my skills as a playwright and researcher to transform the role of the arts in conservation within the UK, by dramatising their work in tackling species loss and the prospect of drastic environmental change to come. This will be achieved through sustained engagement with two nature reserves in Eastern England: Wicken Fen (National Trust) and Strumpshaw Fen (RSPB), both with comparable habitats but run by quite distinct organisations with different histories and ethoi. The central question of the project will be an examination of whether drama can speak to conservation, of how these autonomous organisations can explore striking new forms of public engagement and thereby address the 'great divide' within conservation as outlined in Mark Cocker's polemic 'Our Place' (2018) which risks limiting their work just as it becomes vital. To achieve this I will offer intellectual leadership by undertaking an exemplary research process whereby I examine the workings of these distinct wetland, fen and reed-bed based reserves through an archival lens, a psycho-geographic lens and an ethnographic lens. The findings will emerge in three innovative dramatic presentations - the first generated by a writing group I will convene, the second a forum theatre event examining the prospects for the reserves and the third a major new site-specific performance play created in partnership with celebrated site-based theatre company Tangled Feet which will tour each reserve, which in itself will extend the company's work into new regions and territories and create a wholly new form and context for playwriting. This in turn will inform my writing of a major new work theatrical work and lead to a symposium reflecting on how theatre might serve conservation. During the project I will stage theatrical interventions exploring and extending my own dramaturgy and the current language of playwriting to address the embattled state of nature, the hidden human work of conservation and the gravity of the task we currently face. These performances will include community-based projects, unique public engagement events and a final professional project in collaboration with theatre company Tangled Feet, all offering exemplars of how drama can be used within conservation. These performances will offer milestones at different points in the residencies and be public-facing and free for all; they will take place within the reserves, either within their built structures or outside according to season and theme. They will draw on the past of the reserves resurrecting crucial and often neglected, even forgotten figures in the history of ecology and conservation in the region: Arthur Tansley, Charles Rothschild, Marietta Pallis, amongst others. They will dramatize the untold story of the history of conservation by and for locals, volunteers, scientists and visitors, examining for instance the hostility that has emerged with the rolling out of the Wicken Vision as local landowners have resisted the expansion of the reserve. To this end my experience as a political playwright with a focus on conflict will be invaluable. At the close of this project I will hold a symposium on 'Theatre and Conservation' in partnership with Cambridge Conservation Initiative, thus leading on forging a new academic, artistic and public network; this will bring together people working in conservation in a scientific or public-facing role with writers and artists to examine best practice in dramatising the predicaments of conservation.

The network aims to explore how different ways of researching and writing about the past shape our understandings of contemporary environments, and how we envision what might happen to them in the future. In particular, the network proposes to investigate the ways in which experimental accounts of past environmental change can help prepare us for uncertain futures, and become enrolled in processes of mitigation and adaptation. We refer to this as an experiment in anticipatory history.\n\nThrough a series of workshops, the network will test and develop the concept of 'anticipatory history' and assess its potential contribution to cross-disciplinary research in the histories of environmental change. The network is keenly interested in exploring how such histories might travel outside the academy, and be taken up by people in various contexts. To this end, the network aims to \ndevelop working collaborations between academics and practitioners. Participants in the workshops include representatives from organisations such as the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and the National Trust. It is intended that the outcomes of the workshop will make a tangible contribution to management, interpretation and communication around issues of environmental change. \n\nThis network will achieve its aims by working through two case-studies: landscape and wildlife history. It will do so in the context of the county of Cornwall. Cornwall is a region with a long history of nature study and, as a peninsula and wildlife haven, is particularly susceptible to sudden weather events and to longer term environmental and climatic change. The network will gather together a diverse group of practitioners and academics to advance thinking in the areas of landscape and wildlife change and to explore innovative approaches in the production of environmental histories and futures. \n\nWorkshops will allow academic researchers and environmental writers to present their research on histories of the environment to organisations who are involved in the management of the environment. These discussions will be organised such that they allow these organisations to learn from and take on board these ideas. In turn, the organisations will be able to discuss with academic specialists the specific issues and challenges they face in their work. These discussions will aim to assist public and other organisations in the development of strategies for the communication of environmental management policies and decisions.\n\nThe ideas developed in the network will be documented in an original publication, produced in collaboration with the book artist, publisher and writer, Colin Sackett. This publication will experiment with creative forms of presentation and narration to offer a tangible demonstration of the potential for anticipatory histories of changing places and populations. The book will communicate the outcomes of the network, and will be a useful education and communication tool for many of the groups involved in the network and in related fields. \n