Structural elements, relation types, and value orientations of ecological narratives in China’s agricultural heritage landscapes: a cross-case study based on knowledge graphs

Agricultural heritage landscapes embody ecological, productive, and cultural values, yet existing research lacks methods for tracing how these values are narratively constructed in official case texts. Using case texts of China Nationally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (China-NIAHS) as the corpus, this paper proposes a structured ecological narrative analysis framework. It codes textual expressions into six dimensions: actor configuration, process mechanisms, temporal organization, spatial organization, value orientation, and relation types, and uses a knowledge graph to visualize the “element–relation–value” structure. The results show a stable cross-case pattern of “human action–nested landscape–causal chain–value closure.” While mechanism-based causal chains are widely used, specific process mechanisms remain unevenly articulated, and explicit boundary and constraint information is particularly limited. This study emphasizes that clarifying boundary conditions, cross-scale linkages, and evidence chains is essential for transforming agricultural heritage knowledge into reusable and communicable analytical resources. The study identifies reusable narrative patterns and value-generation pathways, offering graph-based support for knowledge translation, cross-case comparison, and digital communication of agricultural heritage.