The Public Lands Institute is an ongoing photographic index and open-access archive of American public lands. The project pairs field photography with structured documentation, treating each site as a subject with multiple layers of recorded history rather than as scenic landscape. The index currently holds 72 sites across 20 states, documented in 636 photographs, all dedicated to the public domain.
Site records draw on primary repositories: EPA Superfund and cleanup databases; National Park Service administrative histories; National Archives Civilian Conservation Corps records; Library of Congress Chronicling America; federal and state court records; Royce cession maps and treaty texts; native-land.ca territory data; and iNaturalist research grade observations. Travel writing, tourism copy, and managing agency press releases are not accepted as sources.
A reference glossary defines the geologic time terms, managing agency types, archaeological culture designations, and Indigenous nations named throughout the site records.
Every photograph is dedicated to the public domain under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal. Full resolution TIFF and RAW files are freely downloadable from the archive and from Wikimedia Commons. No attribution is required and no permission is needed for any use.