About this report

Currently, the United States has 63 national parks(USNPs), which are congressionally designated protected areas operated by the National Park Service(NPS), an agency of the Department of the Interior.

You may also have heard of “National History Parks,” “National Monuments”, or something similar. They all consist of the National Park System of the United States, and currently, there are 425 units of the National Park System. Therefore, those 63 national parks are also part of the system, and they are what this report covers.

This report aims to apply everything I’ve learned from this R software course and prove my learning by creating a series of visualizations based on data analysis. At the same time, I’d like to share with my colleagues fun and helpful facts about national parks in the U.S. Furthermore, I hope this information might help you decide where to spend time for your vacation.

About the data and the visualization

All the data I used to create this report belongs to the National Park Service. I visited the NPS Stats website to get the data and used 2000-2022 data to produce more timely information. I created a total of 8 figures, using 5 different types of plots and making 2 of them animated and interactive, respectively. You can check the details below.

The list of figures in this report

  1. Figure 1: Line Plot
  2. Figure 2: Bar Plot
  3. Figure 3: Bar Plot
  4. Figure 4: Bar Plot (Animated)
  5. Figure 5: Cleveland Dot Plot
  6. Figure 6: Bar Plot and Point Plot Combined
  7. Figure 7: Bubble Map
  8. Figure 8: Cumulative Line Plot (Plotly)

Figure 8 is a cumulative representation of a total of 63 U.S. National Parks from the first to the most recent by their years of establishment. The figure is created with Plotly so you can hover your mouse over each data point to see its name, year of establishment, and the number of visitors in 2022.