Methods for understanding landscape change: history and future

LRG Research Showcase 2025

This recording captures the Landscape Research Group’s 2025 Research Showcase, held online on 12 December 2025. The event brings together four researchers whose work explores different methods for understanding landscape change across diverse cultural, legal and environmental contexts.

The session highlights a range of approaches, including legal geography and decolonial theory, oral histories and archival research, digital heritage and AI-enabled interpretation, and spatial analysis using remote sensing and machine learning. Together, the presentations demonstrate how methodological diversity can deepen understanding of how landscapes are shaped, experienced and governed over time.

Speakers
Dr Sonya Cotton – legal geography, decolonial approaches and feminist care ethics
Joy Burgess – oral histories and archival research in landscape studies
Dr Yang Chen – digital heritage, spatial pattern recognition and AI-supported conservation
Dr Aïcha Chahbi Bellakanji – remote sensing, GIS and machine learning for landscape analysis

The session includes individual presentations followed by a moderated discussion and audience Q&A.

About the Landscape Research Group (LRG)
The Landscape Research Group is an international charity that supports critical, interdisciplinary research on landscapes. LRG brings together researchers, practitioners and communities to explore how landscapes are understood, how they change, and how they can be managed more equitably and sustainably.

You can find out more about LRG, including membership, events and research funding, at: https://landscaperesearch.org/

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