National Park Visits - Tidy Tuesday Challange

The Tidy Tuesday Challenges are a fun challenge. This is my first try and choosing the National Parks dataset.

National Parks’ Popularity

The chart shows national part visits between 1904 and 2015.

National Park Visits have grown steadily over the last century. The growth trend has plateaued since the 1990’s to ~2010 and sharp uptick from 2010 to 2015. Compared to the population growth, the national park visitation numbers have dropped.

• The plateauing and dowturn in the 90’s and 2000’s coincides with the birth of the internet era. Did Americans get addicted to the internet during this period ???

Another interesting observation : The only period with population decline in the last century is during the time of World War II (1940’s).

Which parks are popular over the last century?

It’s very interesting to see the change of popularity of the parks over time. However, looks like there is something wrong with the data set. Great Smoky Mountains National park does not show up here at all. Based on all google searches and including this Article on fivethrityeight.com, the Smoky Mountain National Park is the most visited.

• 1910’s decade: Hot Springs was the most visited park, very interesteing.
• Assuming the avaialable data (Smoky Mountains Park aside), the top 5 parks remain relatively stable after the 1950’s.

On a personal note, I feel very lucky to have visited every national park on this list except for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Clearly, the number of visitors is growing over time . So, are the top parks are getting a higher % or concentration of the vistors every decade?

No, the top 5 park are consistently getting between 30-40% of the total visitors since the 1950’s. The concentration of the visitors to the top parks was much higher in the early decades of the 20th century.

New Learnings

• Used patchwork library for the first time to create the first side by side plot. This is a package by Thomas Lin Pederson to help arrange multiple plots. I had previously used GridExtra for this same functionality.
• Learned and used custome theme settings for plots (first side by side plot)

Last updated: 2020-05-04