Data and code for analyzing unequal access to social, environmental, and health amenities in United States urban parks

This data publication contains racial/ethnic population data within a 10-minute walk around each of 122,988 urban parks across the United States. These data represent information on the location of publicly accessible parks from the Trust for Public Lands ParkServe 2022 database. The ParkServe data also includes information about trail length, trail location, and playground size and location from 2022. Information on tree canopy comes from the Mult-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium National Land Cover Database released in 2021 and which is based on imagery from 2019. Heat was calculated based on USGS Landsat data from June, July, and August of 2018, 2019, and 2020. Noise was based on modeled data from a 2014 National Parks Service Mapping Sound Project. Demographic information was aggregated to the block level excluding water using the United States 2020 Census. Data in this package include a comma-separated values (CSV) file with information about the characteristics of each park (e.g., size, number of trails, average land surface temperature), as well as transformed versions of this CSV file where parks are grouped by census division or other characteristics for the purpose of analysis. Additionally, CSV files are provided where the full data are summarized by both census division and racial/ethnic groups (e.g., average temperature of parks in division 1) as well as the full results of statistical tests such as two way ANOVAs. The R code included in this package allows the user to reproduce the figures and conduct all statistical analysis from the associated article.
Our study demonstrates how inequities in access to high quality parks are widespread across the country. We compared racial/ethnic differences in access to higher quality parks within cities across the continental United States to answer the following research questions: 1) What is the racial/ethnic composition of the population living within a 10-minute walk of U.S. urban parks in comparison to that city as a whole? 2) Does the distribution of park amenities differ with the racial/ethnic composition of surrounding neighborhoods? 3) How do these patterns in proximity and quality vary across different regions of the U.S.?
For more information about this study and these data, see Winkler et al. (2024).