“show me a voroni diagram of National Parks in the USA (a Gravity Map) with regions being assigned to closest national park. also show me a timeline of how the map changes as new national parks were established over time”
All 63 congressionally designated U.S. national parks, from Yellowstone (March 1, 1872) to New River Gorge (December 27, 2020). Every point on the map is coloured by its nearest park; the tessellation redraws at each of the 53 distinct designation dates. California ends with 9 parks, Alaska with 8.
This is a point-based nearest-park model — each cell contains the land closer to that park's representative point than to any other — not an NPS jurisdictional boundary map. Cells are clipped to the displayed U.S. land extent; the contiguous states, Alaska and Hawaii are tessellated separately within their own panels so the insets do not distort distances. American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands each hold one park, listed below the map.
| Park | State / territory | Designated | Lat, lon | Source |
|---|
Point-based gravity model of the 63 current congressionally designated U.S. national parks: one representative coordinate per park, 63 rows, extracted from the complete park table on Simple English Wikipedia and checked against the English Wikipedia list and NPS park-anniversary dates during research. Dates are national-park designation dates, not earlier monument status. Voronoi cells are computed in projected map space (Albers equal-area families) separately for the contiguous states, Alaska and Hawaii, and clipped to land; American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands hold one park each and are noted in text. 53 distinct designation dates drive the timeline.