This paper describes a research project that aimed to translate complex spatial and scientific data about coastal change into accessible digital formats for general audiences. The project used fine-scale remote sensing techniques including airborne and terrestrial laser scanning to produce spatially accurate and realistic 3D digital visualisations of projected sea level rise at Cotehele Quay, a site on the River Tamar in Cornwall owned and managed by the National Trust. Area residents and stakeholders were involved in a series of focus groups which provided guidance on the integration of the spatial models into a short film. The paper focuses on how the participatory, iterative process adopted in the project shaped the content and design of the film. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this process enhanced the viability of the film as a communication tool for use in wider engagement activities.

Keywords: : Terrestrial laser scanning , heritage , sea-level rise , community engagement , multi-media

© 2019, © 2019 the Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor. &. Francis Group. Heritage relies, to a large extent, on notions of endangerment and consequential attempts to arrest or reverse processes of loss and change. The papers in this special issue engage critically with this underlying orientation, exploring the social and cultural work which is produced through efforts to avert loss. In doing so, the papers also point towards alternative ways of valuing objects, places and practices which are not solely determined by notions of endangerment and risk. We suggest three general themes which connect critical investigation of these issues across the varied natural and cultural heritage contexts through which these papers work–the inevitability of loss; the politics of loss; and the potential in loss. These themes have significant implications not only for the future of natural and cultural heritage preservation, conservation and management but also in mapping out future research directions for critical heritage studies.

In 1999 English China Clays (the then principal china clay producer in Cornwall and west Devon) was acquired by the multinational industrial minerals company Imerys. Shortly after, a group of concerned clay workers and local historians came together in a salvage mission to recover historical documents which had been deemed expendable during the business takeover. Together they ransacked offices and emptied filing cabinets collecting historic documentation about the industry. In the eighteen years that have followed, the china clay industry and its associated landscape have undergone immense change and transformation. Meanwhile, that small band of individuals has grown into the China Clay History Society (CCHS). CCHS is now in the process of formalising their salvaged collection, with curatorial expertise from the Wheal Martyn Museum (of which the CCHS is a component part). In this thesis, the CCHS archive and its associated community relationships are examined in relation to experiences of past loss, present instability, and the hope of future renewal.

Over an extended period of participant observation working alongside the caretakers of the archive, I explored the different practices of collecting, sorting, and valuing which are making and remaking china clay heritage in mid-Cornwall. Drawing on heritage studies and past studies of collecting, as well as professional museum and archival scholarship, this thesis emphasises the role that practice and material relationships play in the assembling of heritage (Macdonald 2009). Two distinct modes of ordering (Law 1994; 2004) – ‘Passion’ and ‘Purpose’ – are identified as central to this research, which aims to show how different practices of collecting and valuing have profound implications for the ways china clay heritage may be performed in the future.

Many carnivore species are experiencing declines due to anthropogenic factors such as direct killing, habitat loss, secondary exposure to chemical control agents, and depletion of prey resources. Due to their top-down effects on the structure and function of ecosystems, carnivores are, however, increasingly the focus of efforts towards ecological restoration. To enable such restoration to take place, wildlife managers need to understand both the ecological processes and the social-ecological factors that may affect carnivore recovery and establishment.
In this thesis, I use the European polecat Mustela putorius, which is currently recolonising Great Britain following near extirpation in the nineteenth century, as a case study through which to explore the processes of carnivore recovery. I investigate social and ecological risks to the polecat’s continuing range and population expansion, which may also be pertinent to the wider challenges of carnivore conservation.
In my introduction, I outline the importance of carnivores to ecosystem function and review the wide-ranging and cascading effects their reinstatement can have. I provide an overview of human-carnivore interactions and the anthropogenic processes that directly or indirectly lead to carnivore declines. I give a historical context to human-carnivore relations in Great Britain, introduce polecats, their biology and changing status and provide an overview of my research objectives and thesis structure.
I then carry out a detailed literature review of the changing status of the eight terrestrial mammalian carnivores native to Great Britain. I summarise the anthropogenic processes that have influenced their status. I find that polecats have recolonised Great Britain less quickly than otters Lutra lutra but more quickly than pine martens Martes martes. Badgers Meles meles have increased in abundance. Foxes Vulpes vulpes are experiencing a decline and wildcat are imperilled by hybridisation with domestic cats. Stoats Mustela erminea and weasels Mustela nivalis are data deficient, but evidence suggests that stoats may be increasing in number relative to weasels.
Next, I explore polecat resource use during a period of ecological change by analysing the stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen from a museum collection of polecat whiskers. I find that variation in isotope ratios and isotopic niches indicate differences in resource use between polecats collected from the leading edge of the range compared to the established parts of the range and that this effect was greatest in the 1960s when rabbits Oryctolagus cuniculus—an important prey for polecats—were in low abundance. I also find that female polecats show greater variation in resource use than males, indicating that they may have different needs as part of conservation efforts.
Next, I carry out a study of polecat diets to assess responses to fluctuating abundance of rabbits. I analyse the stomach contents from polecat carcasses collected between 2013 and 2016. I compare my results with those from earlier polecat dietary studies and find that the proportion of lagomorphs increased in polecat diet between the 1960s and 1990s. Although rabbit populations have been declining since the 1990s, I find no difference in the proportion of lagomorphs in polecat diet between the 1990s and 2010s.
Secondary exposure to second generation anticoagulant rodenticides is a contemporary risk to polecat recovery that is also related to their diet, as polecats are likely exposed to rodenticides by eating contaminated rodents. In Chapter 5, I analyse the livers from polecat carcasses collected between 2013 and 2016 to measure current levels of secondary exposure and explore factors that may affect exposure. I find that the frequency of exposure to rodenticides was 79% in polecats and that this represents a 1.7 fold increase in exposure frequency over 25 years. I find that the probability of exposure increases with age and with increasing values of ẟ15N, suggesting that resource use influences polecat exposure to rodenticides.
I then explore the principles underpinning modern gamekeeping practices, by carrying out interviews with gamekeepers to find out what they do and why. In this qualitative study, I analyse gamekeepers’ conception of the Balance, which is an overarching narrative that they have adopted to explain their approach to wildlife management. Although the Balance includes echoes of the heuristic of the ‘balance-of-nature’, it is most often employed in the context of maximising shootable game surpluses while providing opportunities to other wildlife that do not conflict with this objective. I find that keeping the Balance requires a ritualised, highly interventionist approach to producing game that presents both risks and rewards to predators. The multiplicity of the Balance—in which gamekeepers are stewards of both game and the countryside—creates an ambiguity that, when associated with the regular culling of predators and negative perceptions of sport shooting, may cause misunderstandings between gamekeepers and other publics.
In conclusion, I find that polecats have been able to recolonise most of southern Britain despite the risks of fluctuating rabbit populations, increasing exposure to rodenticides and predator controls. Polecat recovery has occurred with minimal direct conservation effort. It has also taken a long time: one hundred years after their population nadir, polecats are yet to fully recolonise their former range. More broadly, a low-intervention approach is unlikely to succeed, or be desirable, for all carnivores. In particular, those that are slower to mature, have lower reproductive rates, more specialised resource requirements and greater impact on anthropogenic practices, or where the potential ecological benefits that may be derived from a species’ restoration necessitate an expedited recovery.

This illustrated essay presents a series of photographic images documenting the contents of an abandoned cobbler’s workshop in Cornwall, UK. A reflection on the process of encountering and documenting this place accompanies the photographs, and problematizes the impulse to conduct ‘salvage archaeology’ through means of visual representation. The process of photographic mediation is traced through four distinct stages: invitation, intercession, intrusion, and invention. The essay draws on the work of Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig to explore how the act of representation can be seen to be implicated in both the destruction and production of an object’s aura, particularly in relation to transient and ephemeral material cultures.

Mapping the spatial distribution of ecosystem goods and services represents a burgeoning field of research, although how different services covary with one another remains poorly understood. This is particularly true for the covariation of supporting, provisioning and regulating services with cultural services (the non-material benefits people gain from nature). This is largely because of challenges associated with the spatially specific quantification of cultural ecosystem services. We propose an innovative approach for evaluating a cultural service, the perceived aesthetic value of ecosystems, by quantifying geo-tagged digital photographs uploaded to social media resources. Our analysis proceeds from the premise that images will be captured by greater numbers of people in areas that are more highly valued for their aesthetic attributes. This approach was applied in Cornwall, UK, to carry out a spatial analysis of the covariation between ecosystem services: soil carbon stocks, agricultural production, and aesthetic value. Our findings suggest that online geo-tagged images provide an effective metric for mapping a key component of cultural ecosystem services. They also highlight the non-stationarity in the spatial relationships between patterns of ecosystem services.

This paper describes a research project that aimed to translate complex spatial and scientific data about coastal change into accessible digital formats for general audiences. The project used fine-scale remote sensing techniques including airborne and terrestrial laser scanning to produce spatially accurate and realistic 3D digital visualisations of projected sea level rise at Cotehele Quay, a site on the River Tamar in Cornwall owned and managed by the National Trust. Area residents and stakeholders were involved in a series of focus groups which provided guidance on the integration of the spatial models into a short film. The paper focuses on how the participatory, iterative process adopted in the project shaped the content and design of the film. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this process enhanced the viability of the film as a communication tool for use in wider engagement activities.

Keywords: : Terrestrial laser scanning , heritage , sea-level rise , community engagement , multi-media

Geographers have begun to investigate the link between creative production and cultural memory-work, exploring how art interventions frame and facilitate engagements with the past in place. This paper builds on this emerging area of enquiry to examine the transformation of an industrial river landscape in Western Montana, and the production of a sound artwork which attempted to respond to the landscape’s unmaking with an interactive installation at a local museum. An interest in how cultural remembrance is practiced and performed in relation to processes of material disarticulation guides the analysis. In conclusion, the paper proposes that a form of kinetic memory characterises engagement with ephemeral sites and the cultural productions they catalyse. The researcher’s involvement in the installation process opens up an adjacent discussion about geographical research conducted on, and through, contemporary art practice.

In many discussions of how cities in the global North are changing, the growing importance of urban design is emphasised: that is, the production of visually and spatially coherent urban buildings and spaces seems to be increasingly central to urban change. To date, most attention has focused on exploring the reasons for this shift. Much less attention has been paid to the experiences of the people inhabiting and using such designed spaces. Although many authors acknowledge that, in theory, such encounters between human subjects and designed urban environments are richly various and unpredictable, few studies have examined this empirically and learnt theoretically from these encounters. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in the British city of Milton Keynes-the centre of which is a shopping mall, a designed environment par excellence-the authors argue that understanding experiences of contemporary urban change requires a relational and performative understanding of environmental encounters, and they suggest three intertwined implications for rethinking research on urban aesthetics: first, a multimodal and sensuously embedded understanding of vision; second, a practice-centred understanding of the environment; and third, a need for self-reflexive understanding of the researchers' position in the fieldwork.

The historical development of Scottish allotment gardens has invested these urban agricultural landscapes with an ambiguous diversity that persists today in both plot-level practice and in political representations. This paper examines how the ambiguity that pervades allotment practice surfaces as a liability in strategic appeals. I juxtapose a pair of narratives - the story of my involvement in a Scottish Parliament Allotments Inquiry and a history of a single Edinburgh allotment site - to draw out the survival of historical forms in contemporary political negotiations. Although a theory of `tactics' and ` strategies', adopted from Michel de Certeau, frames my discussion, I locate my analysis in the gap between these categories.