This is a work in progress.

Protected Areas Data is a series of openly-licensed spatial datasets, representing protected areas around the world. Each protected area is represented by a polygon geometry and a standardized set of properties. As of mid-2024, protected areas in 50 countries have been catalogued in Protected Areas Data.

According to the IUCN, a protected area is defined as “an area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources, and managed through legal or other effective means” (1, 2). Protected Areas Data tries to capture an up-to-date set of these areas around the globe.

Currently, data is available in a shapefile format. Shapefiles are available in each of the Protected Areas Data repositories on GitHub, which are split by country.

Protected Areas Data for Chile, for example, can be found here: https://github.com/stepps00/Protected-Areas-Data-Chile.

A full list of Protected Areas Data datasets can be found here: https://github.com/stepps00/Protected-Areas-Data.

The datasets are released under a CC BY 4.0 license.