DOI: 10.5061/dryad.stqjq2c8n
title: Network embedding for understanding the National Park System through the lenses of news media, scientific communication and biogeography

description: The United States national parks encompass a variety of biophysical and
 historical resources important for national cultural heritage. Yet how
 these resources are socially constructed often depends upon the beholder.
 Parks tend to be conceptualized according to their (fixed) geographic
 context, so our understanding of this system of systems is dominated by
 this geographic lens. To expose the systemic structure that exists beyond
 their geographic embedding, we analyze three representations of the
 national park system using park-park similarity networks according to
 their co-occurrence in: (a) ~423,000 news media articles; (b) ~11,000
 research publications; and (c) ~60,000 species inhabiting parks. We
 quantify structural variation between network representations by
 leveraging similarity measures at different scales: park-level (park-park
 correlations) and system-level (network communities’ consistency). Because
 parks are governed and experienced at multiple scales, cross-network
 comparison informs how management should account for the varying
 objectives and constraints that dominate at each scale. Our results
 identify an interesting paradox: whereas park-level correlations depend
 strongly on the representative lens, the network communities are
 remarkably robust and consistent with the underlying geographic embedding.
 Our data-driven methodology is generalizable to other geographically
 embedded socio-environmental systems and supports the holistic analysis of
 systems-level structure that may elude other approaches.
description: To expose the systemic structure that exists beyond their
 geographic embedding, we analyze three representations of the national
 park system using park-park similarity networks according to their
 co-occurrence in: (a) ~423,000 news media articles; (b) ~11,000 research
 publications; and (c) ~60,000 species inhabiting parks. We quantify
 structural variation between network representations by leveraging
 similarity measures at different scales: park-level (park-park
 correlations) and system-level (network communities’
 consistency).
description: # Network embedding for understanding the National Park System through the
 lenses of news media, scientific communication and biogeography
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2c8n](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2c8n) To expose the systemic structure that exists beyond their geographic embedding, we analyze three representations of the national park system using park-park similarity networks according to their co-occurrence in: (a) \~423,000 news media articles; (b) \~11,000 research publications; and (c) \~60,000 species inhabiting parks. We quantify structural variation between network representations by leveraging similarity measures at different scales: park-level (park-park correlations) and system-level (network communities’ consistency). ## Description of the data and file structure Inserted you can find the supplementary materials files associated to the manuscript and the code necessary to replicate the results. The CSV file contains descriptive data of the national parks system, including their name and code (acronym), geolocation, area, and assigned budget anually ## Code/Software The code associated is developed in R and ready to work using the dataset publicly available. For further information contact the corresponding author