Caribbean Urban Park Size (Southeast Blueprint Indicator)

Reason for Selection Protected natural areas in urban environments provide urban residents a nearby place to connect with nature and offer refugia for some species. Because beaches in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are open to the public, beaches also provide important outdoor recreation opportunities for urban residents, so we include beaches as parks in this indicator. Input Data * [Southeast Blueprint 2023 subregions]: Caribbean * [Southeast Blueprint 2023 extent] * National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) [Coastal Relief Model], accessed 11-22-2022 * [Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US)] 3.0: VI, PR, and Marine Combined Fee Easement * [Puerto Rico Protected Natural Areas 2018] (December 2018 update): Terrestrial and marine protected areas (PACAT2018_areas_protegidasPR_TERRESTRES_07052019.shp, PACAT2018_areas_protegidasPR_MARINAS_07052019.shp) * 2020 Census Urban Areas from [the Census Bureau’s urban-rural classification]; [download the data], [read more about how urban areas were redefined following the 2020 census] * [OpenStreetMap data] “multipolygons” layer, accessed 3-14-2023 A polygon from this dataset is considered a park if the “leisure” tag attribute is either “park” or “nature_reserve”, and considered a beach if the value in the “natural” tag attribute is “beach”. OpenStreetMap describes leisure areas as “places people go in their spare time” and natural areas as “a wide variety of physical geography, geological and landcover features”. Data were downloaded in .pbf format and translated ton an ESRI shapefile using R code. OpenStreetMap[®] is open data, licensed under the [Open Data Commons Open Database License] (ODbL) by the [OpenStreetMap Foundation] (OSMF). Additional credit to OSM contributors. Read more on [the OSM copyright page]. * [TNC Lands - Public Layer], accessed 3-8-2023 * U.S. Virgin Islands beaches layer (separate vector layers for St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John) provided by Joe Dwyer with Lynker/the NOAA Caribbean Climate Adaptation Program on 3-3-2023 (contact [jdwyer@lynker.com] for more information) Mapping Steps * Most mapping steps were completed using QGIS (v 3.22) Graphical Modeler. * Fix geometry errors in the PAD-US PR data using Fix Geometry. This must be done before any analysis is possible. * Merge the terrestrial PR and VI PAD-US layers. * Use the NOAA coastal relief model to restrict marine parks (marine polygons from PAD-US and Puerto Rico Protected Natural Areas) to areas shallower than 10 m in depth. The deep offshore areas of marine parks do not meet the intent of this indicator to capture nearby opportunities for urban residents to connect with nature. * Merge into one layer the resulting shallow marine parks from marine PAD-US and the Puerto Rico Protected Natural Areas along with the combined terrestrial PAD-US parks, OpenStreetMap, TNC Lands, and USVI beaches. Omit from the Puerto Rico Protected Areas layer the “Zona de Conservación del Carso”, which has some policy protections and conservation incentives but is not formally protected. * Fix geometry errors in the resulting merged layer using Fix Geometry. * Intersect the resulting fixed file with the Caribbean Blueprint subregion. * Process all multipart polygons to single parts (referred to in Arc software as an “explode”). This helps the indicator capture, as much as possible, the discrete units of a protected area that serve urban residents. * Clip the Census urban area to the Caribbean Blueprint subregion. * Select all polygons that intersect the Census urban extent within 1.2 miles (1,931 m). The 1.2 mi threshold is consistent with the average walking trip on a summer day (U.S. DOT 2002) used to define the walking distance threshold used in the greenways and trails indicator. Note: this is further than the 0.5 mi distance used in the continental version of the indicator. We extended it to capture East Bay and Point Udall based on feedback from the local conservation community about the importance of the park for outdoor recreation. * Dissolve all the park polygons that were selected in the previous step. * Process all multipart polygons to single parts (“explode”) again. * Add a unique ID to the selected parks. This value will be used to join the parks to their buffers. * Create a 1.2 mi (1,931 m) buffer ring around each park using the multiring buffer plugin in QGIS. Ensure that “dissolve buffers” is disabled so that a single 1.2 mi buffer is created for each park. * Assess the amount of overlap between the buffered park and the Census urban area using overlap analysis. This step is necessary to identify parks that do not intersect the urban area, but which lie within an urban matrix. This step creates a table that is joined back to the park polygons using the UniqueID. * Remove parks that had ≤2% overlap with the urban areas when buffered. This excludes mostly non-urban parks that do not meet the intent of this indicator to capture parks that provide nearby access for urban residents. Note: In the continental version of this indicator, we used a threshold of 10%. In the Caribbean version, we lowered this to 2% in order to capture small parks that dropped out of the indicator when we extended the buffer distance to 1.2 miles. * Calculate the GIS acres of each remaining park unit using the Add Geometry Attributes function. * Join the buffer attribute table to the previously selected parks, retaining only the parks that exceeded the 2% urban area overlap threshold while buffered. * Buffer the selected parks by 15 m. Buffering prevents very small parks and narrow beaches from being left out of the indicator when the polygons are converted to raster. * Reclassify the polygons into 7 classes, seen in the final indicator values below. These thresholds were informed by park classification guidelines from the National Recreation and Park Association, which classify neighborhood parks as 5-10 acres, community parks as 30-50 acres, and large urban parks as optimally 75+ acres (Mertes and Hall 1995). * Export the final vector file to a shapefile and import to ArcGIS Pro. * Convert the resulting polygons to raster using the ArcPy Polygon to Raster function. Assign values to the pixels in the resulting raster based on the polygon class sizes of the contiguous park areas. * Clip to the Caribbean Blueprint 2023 subregion. * As a final step, clip to the spatial extent of Southeast Blueprint 2023. Note: For more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is available [in the Southeast Blueprint 2025 Data Download] or [Caribbean-only Southeast Blueprint 2025 Data Download] under > 6_Code. Final indicator values Indicator values are assigned as follows: 6 = 75+ acre urban park 5 = >50 to <75 acre urban park 4 = 30 to <50 acre urban park 3 = 10 to <30 acre urban park 2 = 5 to <10 acre urban park 1 = <5 acre urban park 0 = Not identified as an urban park Known Issues * This indicator does not include park amenities that influence how well the park serves people and should not be the only tool used for parks and recreation planning. Park standards should be determined at a local level to account for various community issues, values, needs, and available resources. * This indicator includes some protected areas that are not open to the public and not typically thought of as “parks”, like mitigation lands, private easements, and private golf courses. While we experimented with excluding them using the public access attribute in PAD, due to numerous inaccuracies, this inadvertently removed protected lands that are known to be publicly accessible. As a result, we erred on the side of including the non-publicly accessible lands. * This indicator includes parks and beaches from OpenStreetMap, which is a crowdsourced dataset. While members of the OpenStreetMap community often verify map features to check for accuracy and completeness, there is the potential for spatial errors (e.g., misrepresenting the boundary of a park) or incorrect tags (e.g., labelling an area as a park that is not actually a park). However, using a crowdsourced dataset gives on-the-ground experts, Blueprint users, and community members the power to fix errors and add new parks to improve the accuracy and coverage of this indicator in the future. Other Things to Keep in Mind * This indicator calculates the area of each park using the park polygons from the source data. However, simply converting those park polygons to raster results in some small parks and narrow beaches being left out of the indicator. To capture those areas, we buffered parks and beaches by 15 m and applied the original area calculation to the larger buffered polygon, so as not to inflate the area by including the buffer. As a result, when the buffered polygons are rasterized, the final indicator has some areas of adjacent pixels that receive different scores. While these pixels may appear to be part of one contiguous park or suite of parks, they are scored differently because the park polygons themselves are not actually contiguous. * The Caribbean version of this indicator uses a slightly different methodology than the continental Southeast version. It includes parks within a 1.2 mi distance from the Census urban area, compared to 0.5 mi in the continental Southeast. We extended it to capture East Bay and Point Udall based on feedback from the local conservation community about the importance of the park for outdoor recreation. Similarly, this indicator uses a 2% threshold of overlap between buffered parks and the Census urban areas, compared to a 10% threshold in the continental Southeast. This helped capture small parks that dropped out of the indicator when we extended the buffer distance to 1.2 miles. Finally, the Caribbean version does not use the impervious surface cutoff applied in the continental Southeast because the landcover data available in the Caribbean does not assess percent impervious in a comparable way. Disclaimer: Comparing with Older Indicator Versions There are numerous problems with using Southeast Blueprint indicators for change analysis. Please consult Blueprint staff if you would like to do this (email [hilary_morris@fws.gov]). Literature Cited Mertes, James D. and James R. Hall. 1995. Park, recreation, open space, and greenway guidelines. A project of the National Recreation and Park Association and American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration. Alexandria, VA: NPRA. OpenStreetMap. Leisure. Accessed March 14, 2023. Data extracted through Geofabrik downloads. [[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:leisure]]. OpenStreetMap. Natural. Accessed March 14, 2023. Data extracted through Geofabrik downloads. [[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:natural]]. Protected Areas Conservation Action Team. 2018. Puerto Rico Protected Areas Database. December 2018 version. GIS data. San Juan, PR. [[https://research.fs.usda.gov/iitf/products/dataandtools/puerto-rico-protected-natural-areas-2018]]. 2020 Census Qualifying Urban Areas and Final Criteria Clarifications, 87 Fed. Reg. 80114 (December 29, 2022). Federal Register: The Daily Journal of the United States. Web. [[https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/12/29/2022-28286/2020-census-qualifying-urban-areas-and-final-criteria-clarifications]]. U.S. Census Bureau, Geography Division, Spatial Data Collection and Products Branch. January 4, 2023. TIGER/Line Shapefile, Current, Nation, U.S., 2020 Census Urban Area. [[https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2020/UAC/tl_2020_us_uac20.zip]]. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2018. [[https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-09/Physical_Activity_Guidelines_2nd_edition.pdf]]. U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Gap Analysis Project (GAP), 2022, Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) 3.0: U.S. Geological Survey data release. [[https://doi.org/10.5066/P9Q9LQ4B]].