EMODnet Human Activities, Environment, World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA)

This dataset has been created in 2022 by Cogea for the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet). It contains coastal and marine protected areas in the European seas for those countries that are not covered by the the EEA's Common Database on Designated Areas (CDDA). This dataset is entirely based on GIS Data from the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), the most comprehensive global database of marine and terrestrial protected areas, plus external links and selected tabular data joined by Cogea to the feature attributes, as well as the calculation of marine and coastal location of features. The WDPA is a joint project between UN Environment Programme and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and is managed by UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), in collaboration with governments, non-governmental organisations, academia and industry. The whole datatset is made available online through Protected Planet at https://www.protectedplanet.net/en, where the data are both viewable and downloadable, while the EMODnet subset of data is available at the EMODnet Human Activities portal. In the webmap the WDPA dataset has been filtered by Cogea to show only (i) predominantly or entirely marine areas (MARINE field value=2), and (ii) areas, which even if not identified as predominantly or entirely marine in the WDPA, intersect the coastline or are within a distance of 1 km from the coastline. In both cases the COAST_MAR field value=1. The coastline dataset is available at https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/eea-coastline-for-analysis-2 for continental areas, at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gisco/geodata/reference-data/administrative-units-statistical-units/countries#countries20 for areas in overseas entities. Countries coverage of GIS vector boundary data is: Algeria, Egypt, Georgia, Israel, Lebanon, Monaco, Morocco, Palestine, Russian Federation, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom (including Guernsey, Isle of Man, and Jersey). For further information please visit the Protected Planet website.