Introduction to Our Project

(The beautiful scenery of a national park)

National parks are defined as a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state declares or owns, with the conservation of ‘wild nature’ for posterity and as a symbol of national pride.

Since 1872 that the US government established the first “public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people”, Yellowstone National Park, there has been 423 recreational sites in the National Park System (NPS), while about 60 of those are what we often called national parks. On December 20, 2019 White Sands was re-designated White Sands National Monument as White Sands National Park, making it the 62nd designated national park in the National Park System.

For the sake of data accessibility, in this project, we only focus on the first 61 national parks. Each of these 61 national parks has its own characteristics, but they share the common that they attract a huge number of visitors each year. Despite the impact of COVID-19 on tourism, people are still fascinated by the beautiful natural landscapes in national parks. Thus, we aim to carry out a tourist’s guide for national parks in the US for your reference.

The outline of our tourist’s guide is shown as follows,

• We combine the number of visitors of the years 2007-2016 and the Twitter comments on each national parks to make a ranking of the 61 national parks.
• We gather information and data of the top 10 national parks and make some analysis on the surroundings.
• We carry out cluster analysis with the features gathered above and divide these parks into three categories.
• We get the air ticket price of each top 10 national parks from PHL and make our analysis.