Minnesota's Landscapes: Documenting Environmental History through Archival Sources draws upon the rich resources available in the University of Minnesota Archives.

Over the next year, archivists at the University of Minnesota Archives will create online descriptions for thirty archival collections consisting of 1,300 cubic feet of reports, correspondence, diaries, notebooks, field notes, observational and longitudinal data, photographs, maps, slides, audio and film recordings, and other unique documentation.

This project will benefit those using primary source material who are investigating past environments from 100, or even 10,000 years ago, as a way to identify the effects of climate change and as predictive markers for future changes to our vegetation, forests, and waters. It can inform our understanding of the current agricultural recession with a longitudinal look at agricultural practices and rural communities. It will assist those implementing conservation measures in response to changes in wildlife and bird populations due to habitat loss. It will illuminate the role of technology in Minnesota's mining and mineral resources history and guide present and future decisions. It will serve those focusing on our urban communities and the housing and infrastructure boom in the latter part of the twentieth century. It can provide an anthropological understanding of the earliest communities that lived in this space now known as Minnesota. Most importantly, this project will provide a much-needed contextual arc of archival material for those whose interests rely on evaluating all three principal components of Minnesota's landscapes.