Protected Areas

Protected area boundaries come from a variety of sources, with varying accuracy, up-to-dateness, and resolution. Data for some countries may be imprecise, miss some protected areas, or include boundaries that have since been canceled. Protected area designations, such as "national park," can be applied differently in different countries and may be associated with different IUCN categories. Only areas that meet the IUCN definition of protected area are collected by the WDPA, and thus the data may differ from national-level data on protected areas. Protected areas with no boundary data are displayed as boxes that represent the reported protected area size. The box is centered on a single point location, and the borders do not indicate the real boundary of the protected area.