US National Park Service API

US National Park Service API is the structured record of America's largest network of managed leisure facilities - and of what is happening inside it right now. The estate side alone would earn its keep: 474 park units across every state and several territories, each with its official name, descriptive text, decimal-degree coordinates and activity roster; hundreds of campgrounds broken out to reservable versus first-come-first-served sites with fees and operating hours; roughly 712 visitor centers; 606 parking lots; 287 webcams.

The other half is the operational layer most facility inventories skip entirely. Some 627 live alerts carry closures and danger conditions, about 3,000 events cover ranger programs and festivals, and news releases, road events, tours and things-to-do listings fill in what changed and what is coming. More than two dozen record families sit in the corpus, all keyed to the same four-character park code, so a campground, its closure notice and its parent unit resolve onto one another without fuzzy matching.

What it deliberately leaves out matters too: no visitation counts, no booking inventory, no customer data. It describes the public estate and its condition - which is exactly the layer consumer products and market analyses never manage to assemble themselves.

Three families, read straight from the record set - a park unit announcing itself, a campground with capacity and cost per site, and an alert carrying live operating condition:

Seventeen verified fields span the corpus, and they organize into four jobs. Identity comes first: id pins each record with a GUID, parkCode ties everything to its park unit, fullName and description carry the official wording. Place follows - latitude, longitude and the combined latLong string, so spatial work needs no geocoding pass.

Experience and operations make up the middle: activities lists what a unit offers, amenities itemizes what a campground or visitor center provides, operatingHours records seasons and exceptions, and fees puts cost in as data. The campground trio of numberOfSitesReservable, numberOfSitesFirstComeFirstServe and reservationInfo turns lodging supply into countable supply.

Finally the live layer: title, category and datestart give alerts, events and releases their headlines, classifications and dates. Every definition above is verified against the published specification and worked examples, not guessed from rows.

Additional fields on request: media assets and image galleries, contact and address blocks, entrance-pass details, campground regulation and weather overview texts, boundary geometry, and the topic, people and place crosswalks. They are fully specified but rarely load-bearing until a specific product needs them - a scoped sample shows exactly which columns fill for your use case.

• Geography: all US National Park Service units across all 50 states and territories - 474 in total - with coordinates on every record, so state cuts, corridor cuts and radius pulls all work at delivery time.
• Time frame: the built estate reads as current state - parks, campgrounds, visitor centers, parking lots, webcams - while the operational families roll continuously as conditions change. Treat alerts and events as a sync workload rather than an archive.
• Granularity: one row per park unit, campground, visitor center, parking lot and individual alert or event. Not park-level rollups, not annual visitation summaries - actual sites, actual notices.

Against the wider catalog this note scores 9/10, comfortably above the 7.81 average across 1,744 tracked datasets, earned on fully verified field definitions and the sheer density of the operational layers. Within the leisure-facilities pack it is the deepest single-source view of the US public recreation estate; see where the whole pack ranks at best leisure facilities datasets.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You pick the channel and the cadence; scope-setting, normalization and schema stability are our problem. Rows arrive flattened - one observation per park unit, campground, visitor center, alert or event, with the park-unit code already resolved so families join out of the box and coordinate strings arrive split as well as combined. The seventeen-field dictionary above travels unchanged across all three channels. Cadence changes are a settings conversation, not a re-integration project, and a sample cut to your states and record families comes first either way.

Seven catalog personas carry this dataset in their Leisure Facilities packs; five draw real value:

• Developers & data-product builders (relevance 3) power trip planners, park finders and outdoor apps with official names, coordinates, amenities, hours and live alerts instead of third-party travel-blog listings.
• Market researchers & consultants quantify the US public recreation estate - campground supply, fee points, amenity coverage - unit by unit and state by state.
• Data scientists & ML engineers engineer park-proximity, campground-density and alert-frequency features into demand, tourism and disruption models.
• Journalists, academics & students cite official National Park Service records when reporting on public lands, crowding, conservation and gateway-economies.
• Competitive-intelligence & product teams benchmark booking and outdoors platforms against the official facility inventory - which units, which amenities, which fee levels.

Where the estate meets what people buy for it, vs Decathlon.com structured outdoor sporting goods product list puts the public supply beside the retail demand. For the federal reservations side of the same estate, Recreation Information Database (RIDB) Recreation.gov is the natural companion.

Developers and builders sit highest at relevance 3 - a documented corpus with stable identifiers means routing, filtering and alert surfaces get built once rather than reverse-engineered per park. Market researchers follow at relevance 2: campground supply and fee structures become census-shaped figures instead of survey estimates. Data scientists share relevance 2 for anything proximity- or disruption-shaped, and journalists and academics hold relevance 2 on provenance strength alone.

Know the neighbours. OS Open Greenspace maps accessible green space across Great Britain with typed entrances - the British counterpart to the American estate. Sport England Active Places Power audits English facility provision attribute by attribute. Neither crosses the Atlantic; neither carries live operating condition, which is precisely the dimension this dataset owns.

Three things, all knowable upfront. First, scope discipline: with 474 units and two dozen record families, name the states, units or families you actually need - a scoped extract evaluates faster than a national pull and answers the same questions. Second, decide whether the operational layers matter to your product: if alerts and events ride along, plan for a sync cadence rather than a one-off extract, because their value decays fast. Third, quality scoring puts this note at 9 out of 10 against a catalog average of 7.81, with all seventeen field definitions verified against the published specification and worked examples including the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace record shown above. Samples are re-verified at preparation time rather than quoted from a stale inventory.

Notes that pair well with this page:

• Leisure facilities data hub - the pooled industry view, from municipal inventories to global feature databases.
• Best leisure facilities datasets - where this note ranks against the others cataloged in the same industry.
• vs Decathlon.com structured outdoor sporting goods product list - the public estate beside the retail gear market, compared field by field.
• Recreation Information Database (RIDB) Recreation.gov - the federal reservations layer over the same ground this corpus inventories.
• US National Park Service source note - provenance and publication behavior behind the records above.