Following full vaccination, folks have begun venturing outdoors for the first time in long while - myself included! In support of outdoor-activity planning, today’s post is going to cover forecasting national park visits for each month of 2021. Since there are 63 National Parks in the US across 30 states and two territories, I will employ the sweep package to address the scale of forecasts to be made/reviewed all while keeping the data in a tidy format.

At this point it’s pretty well-established that the pandemic has had a tremendous impact on human life around the world and particularly within New York City’s five boroughs. At the time of this post, over 10% of the USA’s 209K+ deaths have come from NYC alone (23,852). The death-toll from the pandemic is staggering on its own - and continues to shock in its reach - but the addition of the shutdown (and continued restrictions - even in Phase 4 of the reopening) has had a compounding effect on all aspects of socioeconomic activity in the city.