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Making the .gif was no easy task. You will need ImageMagic (zip + installer) and ffmpeg. I recommend these two articles:

library(DT)
library(forcats)
library(gganimate) #may need: devtools::install_github("dgrtwo/gganimate")
library(animation)
library(googlesheets)
library(ggmap)
library(knitr)
library(tidyverse)
library(plotly)
library(stringr)

The parks were geocoded with `ggmap and then I re-uploaded it to the google sheet manually

parks_locations_geocode <-
    parks_locations %>% 
    mutate(Address = paste(Park.Name, State, sep = ", ")) %>% 
    mutate_geocode(Address)


write.csv(park_locations_geocode, "park_locations.csv", row.names = F)

I then made some changes to the data to plot it:

This table shows the growth from the opening to different time intervals