Important definitions you may need to properly understand what your federal representative needs from you...
Character-defining feature: a prominent or distinctive aspect, quality, or characteristic of a historic property that contributes significantly to its physical character. Structures, objects, vegetation, spatial relationships, views, furnishings, decorative details, and materials may be such features.
Cultural landscape: a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values. There are four general kinds of cultural landscape, not mutually exclusive.
Ethnographic landscape: areas containing a variety of natural and cultural resources that associated people define as heritage resources, including plant and animal communities, geographic features, and structures, each with their own special local names.
Historic designed landscape: a landscape significant as a design or work of art; was consciously designed and laid out either by a professional or amateur according to a recognized style or tradition; has a historical association with a significant person, trend or movement in landscape gardening or architecture, or a significant relationship to the theory or practice of landscape architecture.
Historic vernacular landscape: a landscape whose use, construction, or physical layout reflects common traditions, customs, beliefs, or values, which over time is manifested in physical features and materials and their interrelationships, and which reflect the customs and everyday lives of people.
Historic landscape: a cultural landscape associated with events, persons, design styles, or ways of life that are significant in American history, landscape architecture, archeology, engineering, and culture; a landscape listed in or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
Property type: a grouping of individual properties based on a set of shared physical or associative characteristics.
Reconnaissance study: a synthesis of cultural resource information describing the kinds of cultural resources in a study area and summarizing their significance; sometimes called a cultural resource overview.
Section l06, or "l06": refers to Section l06 of the National Historic Preservation Act of l966, which requires federal agencies to take into account the effects of their proposed activities on properties included, or eligible for inclusion, in the National Register of Historic Places.
Setting: the physical environment of a historic property; the character of the place in which the property played its historical role.
Sketch plan: a plan, generally not to exact scale although often drawn from measurements, where the features of a structure or landscape are shown in proper relation and proportion to one another.