Northern Ireland Blue Carbon Habitat Extents from Monitoring Data

Five blue carbon habitats—Intertidal Seagrass, Intertidal Blue Mussel, Saltmarsh, Maerl, and others—are mapped from monitoring efforts for statutory reporting. The data represents the most recent extents of these habitats in Northern Ireland, merged by waterbody. It is published by OpenDataNI under the OGL-UK-3.0 license and was last updated on 2026-03-18.

Use Cases

• Prioritize habitat management and restoration based on mapped extents of blue carbon habitats.
• Assess carbon sequestration potential and biodiversity value of coastal vegetated habitats and biogenic reefs.
• Visualize and analyze the distribution of specific habitats like saltmarsh and maerl beds for web maps and dashboards.

Strengths

• Data is based on monitoring efforts for statutory reporting, suggesting a formal collection process.
• Features are merged by waterbody according to habitat type, which may facilitate spatial analysis.
• The layer is explicitly downloadable in multiple geospatial formats including SHP, GEOJSON, and KML.

Limitations

• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The data only includes the most recent extent for each habitat, excluding historical annual monitoring records.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI

Collection Method

Monitoring efforts for statutory reporting under the Water Framework and Habitats Directive.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-18 11:23:21.791138; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Northern Ireland