Marine protected area coverage in EU Member States, 2021

Methodology

The methodology and the procedure used for selecting marine Natura 2000 and CDDA sites from the tabular and spatial data are outlined in detail in Section 2.6 of the EEA (2015) report and in Agnesi et al. (2017).
The spatial statistics were carried out in ArcGIS. The conceptual basis of the analysis procedures can be found in Agnesi et al. (2017) and are therefore only briefly described here. The procedures included creation of a feature class, for every protected areas network, containing Natura 2000 and CDDA MPAs for every Member State. The dissolve operation was used to estimate the surface coverage so as to exclude any overlap between sites. After having obtained the surface area estimate per network, the overall surface of the combined networks was calculated through the union of the dissolved features of the different networks. An ad hoc routine was written to assign the values of the distinct N2K and CDDA coverage and the overlapping portion of these networks. The surface area coverage was extracted from each feature class and the percentage cover was obtained by relating the surface of protected area against that of the marine waters of each MS on the overall.

Units

Percentage

Additional information

These data do not include marine protected areas designated under the Regional Sea Conventions (the Helcom, OSPAR and Barcelona Conventions) that do not overlap with Natura 2000 or nationally designated marine protected areas.

The dataset EEA Marine waters for analysis - INTERNAL VERSION, Oct. 2022 is restricted, but its metadata is public.