This is America at 250: let's celebrate the plurality of our American heritage.

For the past 16 years, ASLA has collaborated with the National Park Service to support the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) Challenge, a competition to document historic landscapes that tell the stories of our nation.

In ordinary times, we would be jointly promoting the 17th annual HALS Challenge, but these are extraordinary times. As such, ASLA is now calling on its members, students, historians, and other practitioners to submit documentation of historic landscapes in our communities.

This is an open call to complete a historical report that highlights the history, significance, and character-defining features of a selected landscape. Optional measured drawings or large-format photographs may accompany the report. All completed reports become part of the HABS/HAER/HALS Collection at the Library of Congress, contributing to the most comprehensive archive of American designed and vernacular landscapes.

In recognition of the 250th anniversary of the founding of United States, we are encouraging reports that broadly address the theme of landscapes of liberty and freedom.

Across the nation, the idea of liberty has taken root and evolved through the land itself-expressed in battlefields and memorials, public squares and protest sites, trails of migration and emancipation, parks of public gathering, and landscapes that have borne witness to both oppression and liberation. These places reveal the complex and ongoing pursuit of freedom in all its forms-political, cultural, environmental, and personal.

Through this year's optional theme, we seek to honor the diverse stories of freedom that define the American landscape and to recognize that liberty, like the land itself, is both a heritage and a living pursuit. The theme is also meant to serve as a suggestion to help you select a landscape, but this is not a competition, so this call is open to all historic landscape submissions. We will recognize all submitted reports at the ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture in September.

We challenge you to celebrate the plurality of place by contributing to the Historic American Landscapes Survey and build up our national archive in the Library of Congress. To answer the call of this challenge is to strengthen the role and presence of the landscape architecture profession in shaping our country by bringing light to landscape histories and our shared American heritage.