Introduction

This book emerges from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project ‘Multispecies Storytelling: More than human narratives about landscape’ (AH/T006188/1), which ran in the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2022. The project was driven by a central objective: to explore how multispecies storytelling practices can reshape human understanding of landscape and how this can inform community decision-making and valuation of landscape. The project brought together academic researchers with non-academic collaborators, primarily community organisations and artists, to co-produce knowledge about how shared multispecies environments are inhabited and narrated. The project consisted of interlinked events including conferences, symposia, workshops, and meetings, which were designed not only to generate interdisciplinary discussion but also to directly inform the development of methods and approaches for a subsequent AHRC-funded project: ‘Multisensory multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in changing landscapes’ (2020–2023; AH/T012293/1). In this way, the first project functioned both as a space of conceptual experimentation and as a foundation for further applied and participatory research.