Americans Value National Parks More than Ever

Created By: Lauren Hyde, Computer Science '26, for "Love Data Week" at The University of Illinois

Overview and Dataset

When I think of national parks, I think of beautiful sunsets, scenic mountains, and lush forests. As part of the “Love Data Week” Challenge at The University of Illinois, I hope to reflect some of that experience while exploring the dataset of visits to U.S. National Parks over the past 30 years!

Visualized: The Most Visited National Parks

The first interactive visualization explores the trends of the growth of the ten parks that attracted the most visitors over the past 30 years. The radial graph shows the peaks and valleys in the data, mirroring the expansive mountains found at many of the parks.

Data Analysis

National park visits have been steadily increasing over the past 30 years at almost all of the most popular parks. The only notable exception to this is the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which significantly affected all of the national parks. However, most of the parks have fully recovered from this and returned to similar or greater visitor counts compared to before the pandemic.

The next question I had was whether lesser-visited national parks followed a similar trajectory.

Visualized: The Least Visited National Parks

The second interactive visualization explores the growth of the ten least visited national parks, by filtering the dataset to explore only ten least visited parks that reported data each year since 1993.

Data Analysis

The second visualization shows it is not just major tourist destinations that have grown more popular over the last 30 years. Combined visitor counts have almost doubled since 1993, with even greater increases at some individual parks.

Data Sources and References