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.

Between November 18th - 20th 2009 Cumbria, NW England was hit by an exceptional precipitation event producing an unprecedented total of 372 mm of rainfall. Over the 24 h period between November 19th-20th alone, 313 mm of rain fell at Seathwaithe. This was equivalent to a month's precipitation and set a new UK record (Met. Office, 2009, previously 279 mm). The flood was the biggest event recorded in this region and had major consequences for population and infrastructure over a large area, as well as involving loss of human life. Due to its system-wide impact, the November 2009 flooding in Cumbria presents an unparalleled opportunity to gain insight into the controls on, and impact of, an extreme flood within upland, lowland parts of a large catchment. This project aims to examine the whole river corridor of the river Derwent from the headwaters, through Bassenthwaite Lake to the Lowland agricultural/urban catchment identifying key impacts and linkages. Quantifying erosion and sedimentation during extreme events is crucial so that effective hazard management can be undertaken in the short term and long-term spatially targeted management strategies devised. To achieve this, field-data must be collected in the immediate aftermath of the event to ensure essential features of the event are fully documented. Our main objectives are to produce a rapid, structured field inventory of the immediate geomorphic impact of rainfall and flooding on fluvial systems within the River Derwent river corridor along a headwater to coast transect; provide a rapid geomorphic assessment of the role of scour and sedimentation in the vicinity of bridges to discriminate factors influencing bridge collapse and so inform future design practice; identify areas of risk for remobilisation of flood-deposited sediments; delivery of hillslope sediments and hotspots of erosion in the River Derwent to identify zones at risk from future flood events and; work with project partners (EA and LDNPA) and local stakeholders in designating catchment zones that are 'at risk' from erosion and sedimentation.

The project addresses the practical problems of how to undertake robust social cost benefit analysis (CBA) for Culture and heritage capital (CHC) and how to apply and adapt accounting principles for sustainable management of CHC. CHC and Natural capital (NC) are intermingled across the English landscape. Existing approaches for valuing natural capital from the environmental economics literature likely subsume the value of CHC service flows and may compromise policy efficiency by mischaracterizing trade-offs involved in managing natural or CHC. The underlying objective of the project is to 1) Develop CHC valuation methods to be readily applied across a range of assets, and 2) To disentangle assets and services produced and co-produced by CHC and other assets such as NC. The principal output will be an overarching framework for practitioners that will help articulate values and guide decision making. The framework will provide a basis that data and insights from future research can be added to. Our work will develop methodologies and guidance for CHC decision-making and outline the normative criteria for sustainability in terms of these methodologies. Addressing these research problems is essential to improving the joint management of CHC and NC by our partners, realising public benefit, and ensuring socially responsible and people-centred approaches to land management. We will reconcile methodologies currently deployed in existing accounts of CHC flows with those developed and deployed for natural capital (NC) (Bateman et al, 2013;2016). Further, we utilise the infrastructure and connections of National Trust (NT) and Forestry England (FE) to design and implement innovative experimental valuation techniques for separating values, for example for NC and CHC flows, and for physical verses digital CHC assets. This will provide a robust and novel expansion of monetary estimates for CHC value flows. In recognition of the urgent need for such approaches to support responses to increasing pressures for land use change, development, climate adaptation and other drivers this approach will ensure immediate impact on practice with findings reported to policy makers (DCMS, Defra and their public bodies) as the work unfolds. Early deliverables to support sector understanding and application of CHC will include publishing introductory guidance, valuation and accounting methodologies guidance and metrics for monitoring and demonstrating benefit flows and change. To support the sector wide adoption of metrics and enable CHC to be made visible and integrated into existing decision support tools, data layers for baseline CHC will be developed and made publicly available. Subsequent deliverables include new value estimates from our experiments, illustrative case study based CHC accounts, technical guidance, and the dissemination of outputs through conferences, webinars, briefing notes for practitioners and journal publications.