UK Special Areas of Conservation with Marine Components: Boundaries and Features

Boundaries for inshore and offshore Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) defined by the presence of Habitats Directive Annex I marine habitats and/or Annex II marine species. The dataset includes site codes, names, status, country, region, and qualifying marine interest features. It is maintained by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and was last updated on 2026-04-14.

Use Cases

• Mapping marine protected area boundaries based on the provided geospatial shapefile.
• Analyzing the distribution of specific marine habitats (Annex I) across UK SACs.
• Studying the presence of protected marine species (Annex II) as qualifying features within sites.
• Identifying SACs that straddle inshore and offshore territorial sea boundaries.

Strengths

• Includes the most up to date version of SAC boundaries as of 2026-04-14.
• Distinguishes between marine and non-marine interest features for each site.
• Supported by a referenced shapefile for spatial analysis.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to uk_data.

Provenance

Source

Joint Nature Conservation Committee

Collection Method

Defined based on the presence of Habitats Directive Annex I habitat and/or Annex II species interest features associated with the marine environment.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-14 09:48:02.891721; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom (inshore and offshore waters)