Digital preservation of cultural heritage is complex, which is due to the difficulty in representing the three dimensional space (e.g. from underwater or underground to ground) and the temporal dynamic interactions between natural processes and human activities. The development of multi-source detection techniques and multi-dimensional environmental reconstruction technologies provide possible solutions for the above problems. Thus, it is becoming a new hotspot within the research of digital preservation of cultural heritage. This paper firstly reviewed and compared different multi-source detection techniques. According to spatial hierarchy, the detected heritage can be divided into different types, including underwater cultural, near-surface cultural, and the indoor to outdoor landscape heritage. Also, these multi-source detection techniques were further classified and they can be selected for detecting a specific kind of heritage. Secondly, the technical methods of multi-dimensional environmental reconstruction were analyzed. Furthermore, the applications of these methods have been represented and the potential of these methods has been explored in the fields of archaeological cartography, information management of multi-source heterogeneous cultural heritage, three dimensional reconstruction and virtual remediation, and intelligent multimodal interactive presentation. Finally, the research prospect of digital preservation of cultural heritage was proposed from the perspective of multi-sensor collaborative observation, distributed management and sharing of multi-dimensional data, dynamic cognition and reconstruction of environments, and multimodal interactive presentation.