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Sense of place is a critical concept underlying the meanings attached to locations and locales in geography and related fields. This concept is often ambiguous and complex when presented in narrative text and challenging to represent and analyse at scale. Mapping a sense of place in this regard requires more than finding geographical coordinates or drawing polygons around toponyms. Our paper develops the concept of a spatio-textual region (STR), a method for identifying platial clusters embedded in spatial narrative texts and explores the potential for mapping the results. We demonstrate the method on an 1857 publication by Thomas Nelson & Sons, a traveller's guide to the Lake District in England. We envision that this method could be employed at scale for generating novel representations of the sense of place embedded in tourist literature, personal journeys, and other spatial narratives.

 

Changing climatic conditions are shaping how density mediates resource competition. Colonies of the seed-eating red harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex barbatus, live for about 30 years in desert grassland. They compete with con- specific neighbors for foraging area in which to search for seeds. This study draws on a long-term census of a population of about 300 colonies from 1988 to 2019 at a site near Rodeo, New Mexico, USA. Rainfall was high in the first decade of the study, and then declined as a severe drought began in about 2001–2003. We examine the effects on colony survival and recruitment of the spatial configuration of the local neighborhood of conspecific neighbors, using Voronoi polygons as a measure of a colony’s foraging area, and consider how changing rainfall influences the effects of local neighborhoods. The results show that a colony’s chances of surviving to the next year depend on its age and on the foraging area available in its local neighborhood. Recruitment, measured as a founding colony’s chance of surviving to be 1 year old, depends on rainfall. In the earlier years of the study, when rainfall was high, colony numbers increased, and then began to decline after about 1997–1999, appar- ently due to crowding. As rainfall decreased, beginning in about 2001–2003, recruitment declined, and so did colony survival, leading to a trend toward earlier colony death which was most pronounced in 2016. As rainfall declined, apparently decreasing food availability, more foraging area was needed to sus- tain a colony: although the number of colonies declined, the impact of crowding by intraspecific neighbors increased. These processes maintain over- dispersion on the scale of about 8 m, with transient clustering at larger spatial scales. In addition, other factors besides crowding, such as the colony’s regula- tion of foraging activity to manage water loss, appear to contribute to a col- ony’s survival. The adaptive capacity for selection on the collective behavior that regulates foraging activity may determine how the population responds to ongoing climate change and drought.