Nps Gov National Park Service API
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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://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | 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
Why Jentic?
Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.
Credential isolation
The NPS API key is stored encrypted in the Jentic vault and injected as the api_key query parameter at execution time. The agent's prompt context never contains the raw key.
Intent-based discovery
Agents search Jentic by intent (e.g., 'plan a national park trip') and Jentic returns the matching /parks, /alerts, or /campgrounds operations with their schemas, so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing nps.gov.
Time to first call
Direct NPS integration: half a day for key registration, response shape exploration, and pagination handling. Through Jentic: under 30 minutes — search, load, execute.
Related APIs
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
Alternative
National Park Service (US)
Mirror of the same NPS API spec under a longer slug
Choose this slug only if your tooling already indexes it; the endpoints are identical to nps.gov/main.
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.
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