Marine Protected Areas

The WDPA dataset is not necessarily a complete representation of all the protected areas which have been designated globally; the quality of the WDPA depends on the accessibility of accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date protected areas information from data holders. Thus, mismatches between on the ground protected areas and protected areas in the WDPA may be due to a number of reasons that include but are not restricted to: new data being quality checked to fit the WDPA standards, data not submitted to the WDPA yet, new protected area boundaries not being accurately digitized or simply not yet being digitised. In many areas, several (up to eight) designations overlap; it is hence necessary to dissolve the dataset before any surface area calculations are carried out. Details on the common issues and quality limitations of the WDPA are described in detail in the User Manual.

The WDPA is formally paired with a sister dataset: the other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM) database. Resource Watch displays only entries from the WDPA. The OECM database is in development and cannot yet be considered to be a comprehensive representation of OECMs globally. Populating the database will require a concerted effort and long-term collaborations with governments and other data providers.

Although records should not be submitted to the WDPA if they do not meet the IUCN or CBD definition of a protected area, it cannot be guaranteed that data-providers consistently follow this standard. In part, this is because countries often have national definitions of protected areas that may not fully align with the IUCN or CBD definition. It should therefore not be assumed that all records in the WDPA meet the IUCN or CBD definition. However, the majority of these sites are reviewed via discussions with data providers periodically via data updates and tend to be removed before being entered into the WDPA.

The WDPA stores both management categories and governance types as reported by the data provider. In May 2019, 66% of protected areas in the WDPA had an IUCN Management Category, and 88% had a governance type. UNEP-WCMC encourages the adoption of the IUCN standards but does not assign or review the application of the categories by countries.

There are still many protected areas for which there is no IUCN Protected Area Management Category assigned. The absence of a management category does not in any way reduce the importance of a protected area, nor does it imply that the site is not being adequately managed or should be excluded from analyses.

The IUCN management categories are not intended to be hierarchical. They cannot be used to make assumptions about the biodiversity value, management effectiveness, or conservation performance of a protected area.

It is important to note that different designations of protected areas may occupy the same geographical space, in which case each will have a different WDPA identifier (ID). For example, Yellowstone National Park in the United States is a National Park, but this same location is also a natural World Heritage Site. The two designations have different WDPA IDs. For more information on the WDPA ID, see the User Manual.

Due to the inherent variability of data submitted by a wide range of data providers, with different capacity and resources to support the digitization of boundaries, issues with the accuracy of the WDPA database data should be expected. For more information about common issues with the data, see section 5 of the User Manual.