For Day 3 of Dashboard Week, we dove into the rich data provided by the National Park Service (NPS) API. This API is a full of information about U.S. national parks, offering data on everything from activities, alerts, and amenities to campgrounds, fees, visitor centers, and even road conditions. For today’s challenge, our goal was to connect to the API and explore the data to uncover stories worth sharing through a dashboard.
Connecting to an API can feel tricky at first, especially if you’re diving into a new one. One of the most important steps is to read the documentation carefully. The NPS API provides a wide range of endpoints, each serving different types of data, so understanding the structure and the fields available is key. And, of course, you can’t forget to request an API key—it’s like a digital pass to access the data.
It’s been a while since I worked with APIs in Alteryx, so this challenge was a great refresher! For this challenge, I initially connected to multiple endpoints to explore the data a little bit and get a sense of what stories I could tell. The NPS API provides so much variety that it was hard to choose! But ultimately, I decided to focus on two main endpoints: park data and lessons data. Below are my final workflow to get the data from the API.
My goal was to look specifically at educational programs offered in different parks. The NPS API offers information on lessons provided, including details on subjects, grade levels, and lesson durations. This allowed me to get a comprehensive view of the educational outreach within the parks. I wanted to see which parks offer the most lessons, which topics and which age groups are targeted. Take a look at the dashboard in my Tableau to explore the full story, or scroll down for a quick peak of it!
