COLOPHON

A colophon is a tradition carried over from the end of old printed books: a short record of how a thing was made, by whom, and from what. In that spirit, this page is a credit roll.

ParkBound is a small independent project built to help travelers discover, plan, and track visits to America's 63 National Parks. It leans on public data, open source software, and the work of many communities of scientists, rangers, and volunteers. Everything below is here because someone, somewhere, made it free to use.

Data Sources

Hosting

The site is hosted on Netlify, served from their global CDN. Deploy previews, redirects, Netlify Forms (for the contact page), and Netlify Edge Functions all do quiet work behind the scenes. The domain is managed separately and points to Netlify via DNS.

Frontend

The app is a single-page React application, bundled with Vite and styled with Tailwind CSS. Routing is handled by React Router, search by Fuse.js, and interface icons by Lucide.

• React 19 — UI library
• Vite 8 — build tool and dev server
• Tailwind CSS v4 — utility-first styling
• React Router 7 — client-side routing
• Fuse.js — fuzzy search
• Lucide React — icon set

Backend

User accounts, visit tracking, and wishlists are backed by Supabase, an open source Firebase alternative built on PostgreSQL. Row-level security policies keep each user's data scoped to their own account. Email-based authentication, magic links, and password reset flows use Supabase Auth.

Public read-only data (park profiles, species lists, activities) is baked into the static bundle at build time; a Node script pulls fresh data from NPS, iNaturalist, and Wikipedia when it's time to refresh.

Visualization & Maps

Maps use Leaflet via react-leaflet, with tiles from OpenStreetMap contributors. The main map covers North America, with a small inlay to include American Samoa without distorting the primary view.

Visitation charts are built with Recharts, a composable charting library built on top of D3.

Typography

Display type uses the National Park typeface by Jeremy Shellhorn, a family of fonts modeled on the hand-routed signage of the WPA-era National Park Service. Body text is set in a serif pairing chosen to evoke parchment and field-guide printing. The color palette (forest green, parchment, gold, sunset) borrows directly from classic WPA park posters.

AI Tools Used

Much of the code, copy, and design exploration for ParkBound was drafted in collaboration with AI tools, primarily Anthropic's Claude. These tools helped with scaffolding components, untangling bugs, drafting content, and working through design decisions. Every suggestion was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human before shipping.

Nothing on this site is AI-generated imagery; all photos come from public-domain NPS sources or are explicitly credited.

Open Source Libraries

Beyond the core stack above, ParkBound stands on the shoulders of the broader open source ecosystem: ESLint for linting, PostCSS for style processing, and dozens of transitive dependencies that make modern web development possible. A full list is available in the project's package.json. To every maintainer who ships code into the commons: thank you.

Acknowledgements

To the rangers, scientists, and volunteers of the National Park Service, whose careful stewardship and public data make a project like this possible. To the community scientists of iNaturalist, whose observations turn every trail into a research station. To the editors of Wikipedia, who quietly keep the world's reference library current.

And to every friend and early user who clicked around, broke things, and sent feedback: this site is better because of you.

Accessibility

ParkBound aims to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards for color contrast, keyboard navigation, and semantic HTML. We are not perfect, and we welcome reports of anything that falls short. If you encounter a barrier on the site, please let us know and we'll do our best to fix it quickly.