Dataset Card: Protected Planet — World Database on Protected Areas
WDPA
Dataset Card: Protected Planet — World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA)
Status: draft, awaiting maintainer review. Base URL, token auth, and WDPA terms confirmed against Protected Planet documentation on 2026-06-11. The license is restrictive — read the "License and reuse" section carefully.
What it is
Protected Planet is the public interface to the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA), maintained by UNEP-WCMC with IUCN. It is the authoritative global dataset of marine and terrestrial protected areas — boundaries, designations, IUCN management categories, and governance — used to answer "what protection applies here?"
Access
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Provider | UNEP-WCMC & IUCN |
| Docs | API v3 documentation |
| API base | https://api.protectedplanet.net/v3 |
| Key endpoint | /protected_areas (search; also by WDPA id) |
| Auth | Free API token required (request form at api.protectedplanet.net/request), passed as the token query param |
| Formats | JSON (and GeoJSON geometry) |
License and reuse
This is the most important section. WDPA terms are restrictive:
- Query-only. Do not redistribute the raw WDPA database.
- A specific citation is mandatory on any publication or analysis: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (year) Protected Planet: The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA).
- Commercial use and redistribution have additional conditions — read the terms before any reuse.
Treat WDPA as reference-for-analysis with attribution, not as open data to mirror.
Fields
wdpa_id (stable id), name, designation, iucn_category, marine flag, and countries. Geometry is available as GeoJSON; the commons does not republish boundaries beyond what the terms allow.
Limitations and ethics
- Coverage and currency vary by country; "as of" the access date.
- Protected-area boundaries are published by design, so no wildlife-location coarsening applies — but the redistribution terms above do.
How it's used in the commons
This card records Protected Planet as a candidate source for protected-area context in region briefings and future guardian work. Blue Life Commons does not currently publish a Protected Planet connector here. Treat an implementation as unavailable until its code, tests, provenance, license handling, and redistribution controls are publicly inspectable.
Sources (2)
Every claim traces to one of the citations below. Anything that could not be sourced was left out.
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