DOI: 10.5061/dryad.fttdz091w
title: Digital media visibility of US National Parks

description: The US National Park (NP) system is presently comprised of 63 distinct
 protected areas encompassing ∼212,000 km2 (2% of US land area). For over a
 century, the US National Park Service has been charged with managing the
 NP system, yet faces a paradoxical dual mandate – to both preserve
 invaluable national park environmental and cultural resources for future
 generations, and to ensure their public accessibility for recreational
 enjoyment. Yet with &gt;124 million visitors in 2019, the NPs are at
 risk of being ‘loved to death’, as with protected areas the world over.
 Against this backdrop, we analyzed the structure and dynamics of this
 coupled human-natural system through a public lens constructed from
 &gt;426,000 digital media articles mentioning at least one NP. Whereas
 NP visitation increased by 29% and federal budget levels decreased by 15%
 over the last decade, NP media visibility increased &gt;3900%, with
 media articles featuring &gt;1 NP largely associated with tourism
 messaging. Hence, despite NPs fostering public appreciation necessary to
 protect natural capital, the emergence of ecotourism marketing coupled
 with a growing global tourist population has rendered visitation growth
 unsustainable.
description: The US NP system is presently comprised of 63 distinct protected
 areas encompassing ∼212,000 km2 (2% of US land area). To analyze this
 "system of systems", we assembled a dataset of 426,069 unique
 web-based digital media articles representing news articles, blog posts,
 and other web content specifically mentioning any of the 63 U.S. national
 parks by their official name, e.g., “Yosemite National Park”. These media
 articles were originally produced by 16,030 unique media sources,
 according to primary source data obtained from the Media Cloud project
 (MC) database, https://www.mediacloud.org/. In the associated report, we use these data to develop a co-occurrence framework for defining park-park relationships based upon media article co-visibility over the period 2000-2020, by applying concepts and methods from network science, machine learning (NLP), and organizational science.
description: # Digital media visibility of US National Parks
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fttdz091w](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fttdz091w) This document describes the contents of the folder Data_Code/, which contains tabular data and code notebooks generated with Mathematica (v12/13) for reproducing the analysis associated with this data deposit. Primary source records consisting of metadata for individual digital media articles mentioning each US National Park (NP) by its official name at least once were obtained from the Media Cloud project via its open-source API, and integrated with other metadata about National Parks obtained from the US NPS and Wikipedia. ## Description of the data and file structure All data files in Data_Code.zip are provided in CSV (comma-separated value). See ReadMe_DataDescription.pdf for additional details on which Mathematica notebook files generate the corresponding figures in each associated study, and for a description of the input files and output figures/data files generated by each notebook. The workflow for executing Mathematica notebooks is to hit Shift+Enter to execute commands contained in any given cell; the initial cells upload the data files, and from there, the notebook cells should be executed from start to end in linear order. ## Sharing/Access information Primary source data were derived from the following sources: * [https://www.mediacloud.org/](https://www.mediacloud.org/) * [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_parks_of_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_parks_of_the_United_States) * [https://irma.nps.gov/Portal/](https://irma.nps.gov/Portal/) ## Code/Software Notebooks were developed with Mathematica version 13.