Uncovering Environmental Change in the English Lake District: Using Computational Techniques to Trace the Presence and Documentation of Historical Flora

A novel approach combining natural language processing (NLP) and geographic information systems (GIS) reveals temporal and spatial shifts in the Lake District's flora, addressing a gap in pre-20th-century floristic records. By integrating historical texts with Kew’s Plants of the World Online database, researchers traced changes in plant-naming conventions from 1682 to 1904. Collocate analysis and geoparsing identified locations linked to plant names, enabling GIS-based visualization of historical distribution patterns. This methodology bridges digital humanities and environmental science, offering a scalable framework for studying environmental change in UNESCO-listed regions like the Lake District.

Smail, R., Donaldson, C., Govaerts, R., Rayson, P., & Stevens, C. (2020). Uncovering Environmental Change in the English Lake District: Using Computational Techniques to Trace the Presence and Documentation of Historical Flora. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 36(3), 736–756. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa047