canonical: https://jentic.com/apis/nps.gov/main

# Nps Gov National Park Service API

The National Park Service API provides programmatic access to authoritative data about US national parks, including park profiles, alerts, campgrounds, events, visitor centers, multimedia, and trip-planning content sourced from NPS.gov. Twenty-nine endpoints cover parks, activities, amenities, articles, lesson plans, news releases, road events, things to do, tours, webcams, and more. The API is free with an API key obtained from the NPS Developer portal and is the canonical source for park data inside trip-planning, education, and travel apps.

## For AI agents

Look up US national park information, alerts, campgrounds, events, multimedia, and amenities through 29 endpoints. Free with an API key from the NPS Developer portal.

## Scope

Does not handle campsite reservations, fee payments, or recreation.gov bookings - use for NPS-published park content and metadata only.

## Capabilities

- Look up profiles, locations, and operating hours for any US national park
- Retrieve active alerts and closures affecting specific parks or regions
- Search campgrounds with reservation links, amenities, and seasonality details
- List park events, ranger-led tours, and webcam streams for trip planning
- Pull multimedia assets - photos, audio, video - tied to specific parks or topics
- Surface road events, parking lot status, and visitor-center hours for navigation apps

## Use cases

### Trip-Planning Apps with Park Data

Travel and outdoor-recreation apps surface park profiles, hours, fees, and amenities by querying /parks and /amenities. The NPS API removes the need for screen-scraping NPS.gov and gives apps an authoritative source for content that changes seasonally. Pulling alerts alongside park data lets apps warn users about closures before they arrive at a trailhead.

Example prompt: Call GET /parks?stateCode=UT then GET /alerts?parkCode=zion and combine the results into a Zion trip brief

### Educational Content for Classrooms

Schools and curriculum platforms use /lessonplans, /articles, and /multimedia to embed authoritative park content into lessons. The endpoints return ready-to-use lesson plans tagged by grade level and subject, plus photos and videos that can be referenced under public-domain terms. Teachers avoid manually curating content from NPS.gov.

Example prompt: Call GET /lessonplans?q=geology and return a list of titles with grade-level tags for a 7th-grade earth science unit

### Real-Time Park Status Dashboards

Park rangers and concessioners build internal dashboards on top of /alerts, /roadevents, /webcams, and /parkinglots to monitor in-park conditions. Combining road events with parking-lot status lets operations teams reroute visitors when major lots fill up, and webcam URLs feed live feeds into the same view.

Example prompt: Poll GET /roadevents and GET /parkinglots every 10 minutes for parkCode=grsm and post a summary to a Slack channel

### AI Agent Park Discovery via Jentic

Travel-planning AI agents use Jentic to discover the NPS API and call /parks, /alerts, and /campgrounds without managing API keys directly. The agent translates a user's intent - "plan a fall trip to Acadia" - into specific NPS API calls and returns a synthesized brief.

Example prompt: Use Jentic to search 'national park trip planning', load /parks and /alerts schemas, and execute both for parkCode=acad

## Key endpoints

| Method | Path | Description |
| --- | --- | --- |
| GET | /parks | Search and list national parks |
| GET | /alerts | Retrieve active park alerts and closures |
| GET | /campgrounds | List campgrounds with amenities and reservation info |
| GET | /events | List park events and ranger-led tours |
| GET | /multimedia/videos | List park videos by park or topic |
| GET | /visitorcenters | List visitor centers with hours and locations |
| GET | /webcams | List park webcams with stream URLs |
| GET | /thingstodo | Curated things-to-do across parks |

## Key resources

- **Parks** — Search and retrieve park profiles, locations, and operating details
- **Alerts** — Active alerts and closures by park or region
- **Campgrounds** — Campground listings with amenities and reservation links
- **Events** — Upcoming park events and ranger-led tours
- **Multimedia** — Photos, audio, and video assets tied to parks and topics
- **Things to do** — Curated activity recommendations across parks

## Why Jentic

- **Setup:** Wiring the National Park Service API by hand means registering for an NPS developer key, appending it as the api_key query parameter on every request to developer.nps.gov, and mapping the parks, alerts, and campground operations yourself. Through Jentic you install once, import the National Park Service API from the API Directory, store the API key once, and your agent calls it.
- **Permission scoping:** This API exposes read-only content endpoints and passes filters as query parameters rather than resource ids in the URL path, so scope the agent to the operations it needs, such as reading parks or alerts. You choose the operations it may call, so pulling webcams or multimedia is not included unless you add it.
- **Credential handling:** Your NPS API key is stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected as the api_key query parameter at execution time. It never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
- **Discovery method:** Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'plan a national park trip' or 'list park alerts', and Jentic returns the matching /parks, /alerts, or /campgrounds operation with its input schema so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing the reference docs.

## Related APIs

- **National Park Service (US)** — Mirror of the same NPS API spec under a longer slug
- **NOAA** — US weather, climate, and environmental data
- **data.gov** — Catalog of US federal open datasets including the data.gov API key infrastructure

## FAQ

### What authentication does the National Park Service API use?

The NPS API uses an API key passed as the api_key query parameter, registered at the NPS Developer portal at https://www.nps.gov/subjects/developer/. Through Jentic, the key is stored encrypted in the vault and injected at request time, so it never appears in agent prompts.

### Can I retrieve real-time park alerts with the National Park Service API?

Yes. GET /alerts returns active alerts filterable by parkCode, state, or query string. Each alert includes category, title, description, and lastIndexedDate so apps can surface only fresh advisories.

### What are the rate limits for the National Park Service API?

The NPS Developer portal rate-limits API keys at the standard data.gov tier of 1,000 requests per hour by default. Hourly limits are returned in the X-RateLimit-Remaining response header so clients can back off before hitting zero.

### How do I plan a trip to a specific park through Jentic?

Search Jentic for 'national park trip planning', load the /parks and /alerts schemas, and execute both with the parkCode you want. The flow is pip install jentic, then await client.search, load, and execute.

### Is the National Park Service API free?

Yes. The NPS API is free under the data.gov terms of service. You only need to register for an api.data.gov key and respect the published rate limits.

### Which national park resources does the National Park Service API cover?

It covers parks, alerts, amenities, articles, campgrounds, events, fees and passes, lesson plans, multimedia (audio, galleries, videos), news releases, parking lots, passport stamps, people, places, road events, things to do, topics, tours, visitor centers, and webcams.

### Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the National Park Service API?

Yes. Because Jentic One is self-hosted, you set the rules, so you grant your agent only the read-only operations it needs, such as GET /parks and GET /alerts, and leave the rest off. The endpoints take filters like parkCode and state as query parameters rather than resource ids in the path, so an agent scoped to read alerts cannot reach into other data. If you never enable GET /webcams or the /multimedia endpoints, the agent cannot call them, and your stored NPS API key is injected only for the operations you allow.