DWPA: Drinking Water Protected Area Catchments in Northern Ireland

Drinking Water Protected Areas (DWPA) have been designated under Article 8 of The Water Environment (Water Framework Directive) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2017. Each polygon represents a holistic upstream hydrological catchment supplying surface drinking water abstraction points. The dataset is maintained by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency and is available under an Open Government Licence.

Use Cases

• Mapping drinking water source catchments for regulatory compliance assessments based on DWPA designation.
• Analyzing upstream land use impacts on abstraction points based on catchment polygons.
• Planning water resource protection measures based on holistic hydrological catchment boundaries.
• Integrating protected area data with other environmental datasets for cross-compliance reporting.

Strengths

• Dataset is cross-platform, appearing on both UK and EU open data portals, indicating its importance for regulatory transparency.
• Has a specific legal designation basis (Article 8 of the Water Framework Directive Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2017).
• Maintained by an authoritative government agency (Northern Ireland Environment Agency/DAERA).

Limitations

• Column names and detailed schema are unknown across all sources, limiting precise understanding of data attributes.
• No row counts, file sizes, or temporal coverage information are provided in any source.
• Metadata completeness is low; author and specific update frequency are not detailed.

Provenance

Source

Northern Ireland Environment Agency (DAERA)

Collection Method

Designated and identified in accordance with regulatory requirements.

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-04-15 according to uk_data platform entries.

Geography

Northern Ireland