Every National Park on Earth

What the colours mean

At a world view, the colours are about density— each cluster is tinted by how many parks it contains, from a cool teal lone park up through green, blue, gold and amber to a blazing red where hundreds gather. That is the headline: where the world protects its land. Zoom in and the clusters break apart into single green dots, one per park; tap any of them for its name and, where the map records it, its IUCNprotection category. We colour by density rather than by category because the category is recorded for fewer than half of the world’s parks — so density is the honest, always-present story.

What actually makes a park a “national” park — and why Australia, with its state-run park systems, tops the count — is worth a couple of minutes:

Where parks cluster

The countries with the most national parks — a mix of genuine protected-land density and how each country defines and maps its parks. Open a country for its park count, how many carry an IUCN category, and a sample of named parks.

About this data

Parks and their outlines come from OpenStreetMap, the open, community-mapped database of the world, under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Each park is plotted at the centre of its mapped boundary. We map 2,478 national parks in all, of which 2,369fall within a country that has an international (ISO) code and so get a country page; a small number sit in disputed or untagged territory and appear on the map without one. National parks are recorded in OpenStreetMap under two different conventions, so we gather both and keep only those that a park’s name or its protection category confirms is a genuine national park — which is why provincial parks, state parks, nature reserves and generic protected areas are deliberately left off. We refresh the snapshot periodically rather than calling OpenStreetMap on every visit.