Where are America's national parks really crowded?
Copyright 2026 Craig Muldoon. Made with Plotlay (https://www.getplotlay.com).

This repository contains code, data we made, and data from the sources below.

CODE
  The notebook and the Power BI project (its Power Query, DAX and report files) are licensed under the MIT licence
  (LICENSE).

DATA WE MADE
  The visitor cores (data/geometry/cores.*), the tables in data/tables/ (each park's summary, its months with visits per
  km2 a day of the park and of the core) and the visuals are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
  International (LICENSE-DATA). Please credit: "National parks crowding: Plotlay (getplotlay.com), from National Park
  Service data". They are made from the sources below.

UPSTREAM SOURCES (all works of the United States Government, public domain in the United States, 17 U.S.C. 105)

  National Park Service, Visitor Use Statistics (IRMA), monthly recreation visits per park, 1979 to 2025,
  irma.nps.gov/Stats (fetched 8 November 2026 from the public IRMA Stats service).

  National Park Service, Land Resources Division: park boundaries (NPS Land Resources Division Boundary and Tract Data
  Service). NPS notes these are administrative boundaries, not survey quality and not legal documents.

  National Park Service servicewide public datasets: roads, trails, points of interest and parking lots
  (mapservices.nps.gov, NationalDatasets).

  U.S. Census Bureau, TIGERweb Transportation (TIGER/Line roads): the roads for the four parks with no NPS road data
  (Cuyahoga Valley, Hot Springs, Gateway Arch, New River Gorge).

  Base map in the Plotlay project, the app screenshots and the page: USDA, USGS The National Map: Orthoimagery.

  Changes: the 20 most visited National Parks of 2025 and five contrasts; each park's visitor core drawn by one written
  rule (250 m either side of the paved park roads, 100 m either side of trails within 2 km of them, 200 m round visitor
  facilities and 50 m round parking lots, clipped to the park); visits per km2 a day of the park and of the core
  worked out by us; shapes simplified for the web.

POWER BI MAP CONTEXT
  The Shape Map in powerbi/ draws the US states round the cores: US Census Bureau, TIGERweb (States), public domain,
  generalised.

NOT INCLUDED
  Nothing in this repository is derived from OpenStreetMap. No imagery was traced. Nothing here implies endorsement by
  the National Park Service, the USGS or the Census Bureau.

THIRD-PARTY SOFTWARE
  The notebook uses pandas, GeoPandas, Shapely, pyproj and Matplotlib (installed from requirements.txt, each under its
  own licence). Fonts in the visuals: IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Sans Condensed, SIL Open Font License 1.1.
