“Exploring the Great Outdoors: A Look at National Park Visitation Trends”
Authors: Nishaanth Krishnan (Project Lead), Paige Lee, Ayaan Raina, Damien Ha, Nathanael Nam
Summary
We did an analysis of national park visitation data to see the trends in who was visiting the parks, where the most popular park sites were, and trends in the context of recent events like COVID-19.
Introduction
As people become increasingly drawn to outdoor recreation and nature-based activities, it’s important to understand how these trends are reflected in visitation to our national parks. The National Park Service (NPS) has been keeping detailed records on park visitation for many years, offering a valuable window into the changing habits and preferences of visitors. In this project, we aim to dive deep into the data obtained from the NPS and explore the trends in national park visitation over time. By analyzing this information, we hope to gain a better understanding of how park visitation has evolved and what factors may be contributing to these changes. Whether you’re a nature enthusiast, a policy maker, or simply curious about trends in outdoor recreation, this project will offer valuable insights into the fascinating world of national park visitation.
Section 1: Who visits?
We first decided to look at trends over time in visitation in parks in the regions of the United States.
The initial plot depicts the annual count of recreation visitors for each of the seven designated regions from 1979 to 2021. It is noteworthy that the Southeast region consistently exhibits the highest count of recreation visitors throughout the years, followed by Pacific West, Northeast, and Intermountain. Notably, each region experienced a decline in the number of recreation visitors in 2020, likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a resurgence in 2021.
An interesting observation from this analysis was the prominence of the Southeast region in attracting a substantial number of recreation visitors. This finding was particularly intriguing, given the common association of the Pacific West region with a significant number of national parks. Consequently, we further investigated the top five most visited national parks in the Southeast region to gain deeper insights.
Interestingly, we discovered that two out of the top five national parks in the Southeast region were parkways, namely the Blue Ridge Parkway and Natchez Trace Parkway. It is plausible that these two parkways attract a high volume of vehicle traffic, contributing to the Southeast region’s high count of recreation visitors. The remaining non-parkway national parks among the top five were the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in TN, the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in GA, and the Gulf Islands National Seashore in MI.
Looking at this at the state level, we made the heatmap below:
From the data collected over the past year on recreational park visitations throughout the United States, certain trends can be observed. A closer look at the United States map reveals that California stands out with the highest number of recreational visits, totaling 38 million visitors, while states like Illinois and Idaho have less than a million recreational visits per year. Geographical trends are also evident, with the west coast, mainly due to California alone, having a significantly higher number of visitors compared to its midwest counterpart. The midwest states appear the darkest on the graph, indicating that these states have the lowest recreational park visitations in 2022 on average. In contrast, the east coast has a higher number of recreational visits that are spread out through multiple states along the coastline, possibly indicating a higher number of overall parks that are less popular. The west coast, on the other hand, may have a few very popular parks that cause a high concentration of visitors into the state of California.
Section 2: Seasonal Trends
The heatmap of visits to national parks by month provides a visual representation of the seasonal patterns in park visitation. The heatmap displays the number of visits to the parks each month, with darker colors indicating higher visitation and lighter colors indicating lower visitation.
From the heatmap, we can observe that there is a clear pattern of increased visitation to national parks during the summer months, with July and August being the busiest months. This is likely due to a combination of factors, including school holidays, warmer weather, and longer daylight hours, which make it easier for visitors to spend more time in the parks.
Conversely, we can see that visitation to the parks is lowest in the winter months, with December and January being the least busy. This is also understandable since many national parks are located in areas that experience cold weather and snowfall during the winter, making it less appealing for many visitors to explore the parks.
Section 3: Who stays?
Have you ever wondered who visits national parks and how they choose to camp during their stay? The correlation matrix provides a fascinating glimpse into the relationship between different types of campers who stay overnight in US National Parks. By examining the correlation coefficients between pairs of variables, we can begin to understand the complex patterns that exist within the camping community.
At first glance, we can see that there is a strong positive correlation between tent campers and RV campers, which suggests that these two groups might be more similar than we initially thought. On the other hand, the weak positive correlation between backcountry campers and non-recreation visitors indicates that these two groups tend to be distinct and might have different motivations for visiting national parks. These findings can help park managers to better understand visitor behaviors and preferences, and to make informed decisions about resource allocation and infrastructure planning.
It’s important to remember that correlation does not imply causation, and these results only provide a snapshot of the relationship between different types of campers staying overnight in national parks. Nonetheless, exploring the correlation matrix offers a unique opportunity to gain insights into the camping community and how it interacts with national parks.
If we wanted to further explore the relationship between two of our variables, one approach we could employ is fitting a linear regression model. Linear regression simply attempts to find the best fitting line to model the relationship between two variables and it is assumed that this relationship is a straight line, hence linear. Let’s explore the apparently strong correlation we observed between RV campers and tent campers. If we let y be RV campers and x be tent campers for example, fitting a linear regression model gives us the equation below. This implies that on average, for an increase in tent campers by 1, RV campers increased by about 1.373.
Our linear regression report also includes a value called R-squared. This value tells us how much of the variability in our Y value is explained by the X value in our regression model.
From the given values it seems nearly 96% of the variability in RV campers is explained by tent campers in this model. This is a fairly high percentage and is one criteria to suggest our model is a good fit to the data. While there are more criteria we could use to scrutinize our model, for simple exploratory purposes we can use our given model to better understand the relationship between tent and RV campers.
Section 4: COVID-19
The coronavirus pandemic had a huge impact on many things, and the national parks were no exception. While most national park sites remained inaccessible due to stay-at-home orders in the first few months of the pandemic, many started to open up later, providing Americans with an opportunity to engage in safer outdoor activities.
The presented plot illustrates the annual count of recreational visitors in each specified region from 2010 to 2021. Notably, over this period, the Midwest and Alaska consistently reported the lowest numbers of recreational visitors. In 2020, the total number of visitors across all regions showed a significant decline, reflecting the impact of the global pandemic and the reduced priority given to national parks. However, it is noteworthy that the Midwest and Alaska did not experience a substantial reduction in visitor numbers, contrary to expectations. Several hypotheses may explain this phenomenon, including the possibility that the conservative political cultures of these regions may have influenced attitudes towards Covid-19 regulations, resulting in some individuals being less inclined to comply with public health mandates. It is important to note, however, that individual behaviors cannot be generalized to entire regions, and further research is needed to understand the underlying factors contributing to the observed trends.
Conclusion:
Overall, the data makes it clear that national parks have grown in popularity over the last few decades. However, visitation tends to be focused in regions with more park sites such as the Southeast and California. COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on park visitation by making park visitation decline, but numbers have rebounded in 2021.
