Water Framework Directive Protected Area - Shellfish Waters

Shellfish Water Protected Areas are designated under the Water Framework Directive following the repeal of the EU Shellfish Waters Directive in 2013. The dataset likely contains geospatial boundaries and associated attributes for areas requiring legislative protection to support shellfish populations. Its cross-platform presence indicates it is a standardized reference dataset for environmental management.

Use Cases

• Mapping protected shellfish water zones based on geospatial boundaries.
• Monitoring compliance with Water Framework Directive standards for designated areas.
• Analyzing historical transitions in shellfish water policy following the 2013 regulatory change.

Strengths

• Cross-platform availability on UK and EU open data portals signals its importance as a reference dataset.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats (e.g., ESRI SHAPE, GPKG, GEOJSON) suggests interoperability for GIS analysis.

Limitations

• Critical metadata is missing, including column names, row counts, and spatial scale.
• Conflicting license information exists between sources (OGL-UK-3.0 vs. http://reference.data.gov.uk/id/open-government-licence).
• The dataset's description is highly repetitive across sources, indicating sparse contextual documentation.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-04-15 according to one source, but other sources list no update date.

Geography

Likely covers areas within the UK and EU, but specific geography is not stated.