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
The protected-area signal for Ocean Intelligence guardians (e.g. the Ningaloo Reef Guardian's protected-area context) and for region briefings' "Protections and regulations" sections. Connector spec: integrations/protected-planet.md in the Ocean Intelligence System.
Sources (2)
Every claim in this artifact traces to one of the citations below. Anything that could not be sourced was left out.
Related in the commons
Dataset Card: GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
GBIF is an international, government funded open data infrastructure providing access to hundreds of millions of biodiversity occurrence records plus a unified backbone taxonomy. For ocean work it complements OBIS: broad
Dataset Card: iNaturalist — Citizen-Science Observations API
iNaturalist is a global citizen science platform where people record species observations with photos and community identifications. It is a rich source of recent, geographically broad occurrence data — and a place the p
Dataset Card: NOAA Coral Reef Watch — 5km Bleaching Heat-Stress Products
NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) operates satellite based monitoring of coral reef thermal stress. Its daily global 5km (v3.1) product suite turns sea surface temperature into the earliest legible warning of bleaching risk. T
Dataset Card: OBIS — Ocean Biodiversity Information System
OBIS (the Ocean Biodiversity Information System) is a global, open access platform run under IOC UNESCO that integrates, quality controls, and serves marine species occurrence records — over 100 million records of roughl