Nps Gov National Park Service API
Browse all Nps Gov APIs46
AI ReadinessFoundational (D)46/100
Official vendor OpenAPI document · agent-readyMaps GeolocationPlaces SearchapiKey29 EndpointsREST
For 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.
Use for: Find all national parks in California, Get current alerts for Yellowstone, Search campgrounds at Yosemite with electrical hookups, List upcoming ranger-led tours at Grand Canyon
Not supported: Does not handle campsite reservations, fee payments, or recreation.gov bookings - use for NPS-published park content and metadata only.
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.
Install Jentic One Beta
Connect the National Park Service API to your agent
Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the National Park Service API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
1
Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fnps.gov%2Fmain" | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fnps.gov%2Fmain" | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.
Capabilities
What an agent can do with National Park Service API.
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
Patterns agents use National Park Service API for, with concrete tasks.
★ 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.
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.
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.
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.
Use Jentic to search 'national park trip planning', load /parks and /alerts schemas, and execute both for parkCode=acad
Key Endpoints
29 endpoints — 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.
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
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
Jentic AI Readiness Score
This API is usable in Jentic One now. Its AI-readiness score against Jentic's framework shows where it stands today and where improvements would make it even easier for agents to use.
N
National Park Service API
- Foundational (D)46/100
85
Foundational Compliance63
Developer Experience & Jentic Compatibility47
AI-Readiness & Agent Experience94
Agent Usability15
Security65
AI DiscoverabilityPowered by JenticScoring Framework 1.0.0 | Scoring Engine 0.4.0
Show dimension breakdown
85
Foundational Compliance
Base layer of spec validity and structural soundness.
Grade: ASignals: 4
98%
Lint Results
Aggregated quality score from linter diagnostics, weighted by severity.
100%
Resolution Completeness
Percentage of `$ref` references that resolve successfully.
100%
Specification Validity
Checks whether the API description parses successfully and conforms to its declared specification (e.g., OpenAPI).
42%
Structural Integrity
Structural correctness score based on schema issues using logarithmic dampening.
63
Developer Experience & Jentic Compatibility
Clarity, completeness, and ingestion readiness for developers and tooling.
Grade: B-Signals: 4
0%
Example Density
How richly the API is illustrated with examples.
100%
Example Validity
Percentage of examples that conform to their schemas.
51%
Response Coverage
Percentage of operations with complete response definitions (success, client error, server error).
100%
Tooling Readiness
Health of API ingestion, bundling, and resolution within Jentic pipelines.
47
AI-Readiness & Agent Experience
Semantic breadth, depth, and agent comprehension for AI systems.
Grade: DSignals: 4
36%
Description Coverage
Coverage of descriptions across API elements.
0%
Error Standardization
Coverage of RFC 9457 Problem Details for error responses.
100%
OperationId Quality
Coverage, uniqueness, and casing consistency of operationIds for AI inference.
50%
Summary Coverage
Coverage of summaries across operations/tags/info.
94
Agent Usability
Functional utility, complexity comfort, and AI orchestration readiness.
Grade: A+Signals: 1
94%
Complexity Comfort
Agent comfort level based on API operational and structural complexity.
15
Security
Trust, risk posture, and security compliance.
Grade: FSignals: 1
15%
Authentication Strength
Average quality of security schemes based on authentication method strength (weakest link for OAuth2).
65
AI Discoverability
Findability, semantic richness, and reasoning readiness.
Grade: BSignals: 1
65%
Descriptive Richness
Clarity and depth of descriptions across API elements.
Score it yourself
Every API in the directory is allowlisted, so you can re-score it with no key required.
npx @jentic/api-scorecard-cli score <openapi-url>Why Jentic?
What agents get from Jentic-routed access to this vendor.
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 isolation
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.
Intent-based discovery
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
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
FAQs
Specific to using National Park Service API through Jentic.
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.
GET STARTED