API Changelog

This page documents changes made to the NPS API. We recommend that you periodically check this list for any new announcements. To see what changes may appear here next, visit the NPS API Roadmap.

NPS API New Endpoints, IDs, and Start Parameter - Release 2020-07-01

There have been many updates to the NPS API in the previous weeks. We apologize if these updates have caused any inconvenience and believe that they will result in a better product.

New Endpoints - Several new API endpoints have been added and are documented. They include:
  • /activities
  • /activities/parks
  • /amenities
  • /amenities/parksplaces
  • /amenities/parksvisitorcenters
  • /passportstamplocations
  • /thingstodo
  • /topics
  • /topics/parks
  • /tours
IDs - NPS API endpoints that had integer values for IDs are being converted to GUIDs. So, an object ID that was previously "12345" will now look something like "66139E80-4A95-4685-A762-B224598F8568".

Start Parameter - The “start” parameter will still indicate the number of the result you want to start with when paging through results from a query. However, whereas the “start” parameter was previously one-based, it is now zero-based.

So, previously, if you hit the /alerts endpoint without using the “start” or “limit” parameters, you would get the first fifty alerts (1-50) for all national parks. To get the next fifty alerts (51-100), you would have made a request like /alerts?start=51. However, now that the start parameter is zero-based, the first query will still return fifty alerts (0-49) and you’ll want your second query to be /alerts?start=50.

NPS API Base URL - Release 2017-09-XX

Due to the NPS API leaving beta, the version number referenced in the resource endpoints of URLs for API calls is changing. For example, the previous resource endpoint for parks referenced v0 of the API and looked like the following:

https://developer.nps.gov/api/v0/parks

Now that the NPS API has left beta and is on v1, that same resource endpoint is:

https://developer.nps.gov/api/v1/parks

Please note that calls to v0 of the NPS API will no longer respond with data.

NPS API Update Interval - Release 2017-08-02

The interval in which most NPS API data is updated from its data sources has been shortened from 4 hours to 2 hours in order to provide the most up-to-date information possible. The endpoints affected by this change include:
  • Alerts
  • Articles
  • Campgrounds
  • Events
  • Lesson Plans
  • News Releases
  • Parks
  • People
  • Places
  • Visitor Centers

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Last updated: July 1, 2020

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