This paper addresses how a digital heritage project can impact the research and interpretation of a large-scale rural cultural landscape in the United States. Due to the size and scope of rural landscapes, large-scale documentation methods are critical to advancing landscape conservation and preservation initiatives. Using an in-progress online project to document a 1935 US federally sponsored program, the Prairie States Forestry Project (PSFP), the authors show how diverse visual and textual data can be spatialised to construct a map reading of landscape change over time. To date, the PSFP is one of the largest afforestation projects in the history of the United States; the United States Forest Service and thousands of landowners undertook a series of cooperative planting agreements to plant over 200 million trees over seven years in approximately 33,000 shelterbelts from the panhandle of Texas to the North Dakota border. Due to a lack of coordinated monitoring, shelterbelt location and status was unknown, and the original archival material remained unpreserved. In the case of the Prairie States Forestry Project, the process for digitising and disseminating previously inaccessible primary source documents is an act of preservation that creates opportunities for future large-scale landscape conservation projects. The application of the archival mapping method and resulting PSFP datasets can be incorporated by individuals working on heritage documentation such as Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) reports, National Register nominations, or Cultural Landscape Reports for the National Parks Service. The dataset could also be used by private groups such as cooperative conservation land managers.

中文翻译：

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数字文化遗产和乡村景观：保存美国景观保护的历史

本文探讨了数字遗产项目如何影响美国大规模乡村文化景观的研究和解释。由于乡村景观的规模和范围，大规模的记录方法对于推进景观保护和保存计划至关重要。作者使用正在进行中的在线项目记录了1935年美国联邦政府资助的计划-草原国家林业计划（PSFP），作者展示了如何对各种视觉和文本数据进行空间化处理，以构建随时间推移景观变化的地图。迄今为止，PSFP是美国历史上最大的造林项目之一；美国森林服务局和数千名土地所有者签订了一系列合作种植协议，在七年内从得克萨斯州泛滥区到北达科他州边界的约33,000根防护林中种植了2亿棵树。由于缺乏协调的监测，防护林带的位置和状态未知，原始档案材料仍未保存。就草原国家林业项目而言，数字化和传播以前无法获得的原始资料的过程是一种保存行为，为未来的大型景观保护项目创造了机会。档案存档方法的应用和生成的PSFP数据集可以由从事遗产文件（例如美国历史景观调查（HALS）报告，国家注册机构提名，或国家公园管理局的文化景观报告。该数据集还可以由私人团体（如合作保护地的经理）使用。