Special Protection Areas (SPAs): Site Details for Bird Conservation in the UK

Special Protection Areas (SPAs) are strictly protected sites classified under the EC Birds Directive from April 1979. The dataset contains site details for each SPA, including codes, names, areas, coordinates, and classification dates, compiled by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. It is updated whenever new or amended information is submitted to the EU Commission.

Use Cases

• Map and analyze the geographic distribution of protected bird habitats based on latitude and longitude coordinates.
• Assess site characteristics and quality for conservation priority ranking based on the SITE_CHARACTERISTICS and SITE_QUALITY fields.
• Track the timeline of site classification and legal protection using Date_first_classified and SITE_SPA_LEGAL_REF.
• Identify marine versus terrestrial protected zones using the IS_MARINE and Zone fields.

Strengths

• Contains explicit spatial data including latitude, longitude, and grid references.
• Includes temporal data points such as the date a site was first classified.
• Updated whenever new information is submitted to the EU Commission, suggesting a maintained process.

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

Information compiled from sections of the Standard Data Form required by the EU Commission.

Time Range

Sites classified under a directive from April 1979; dataset includes a SITE_COMP_DATE field.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-14 09:45:37.409592; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Likely covers Special Protection Areas within the jurisdiction of the submitting country (implied as UK).