UK OSPAR Marine Protected Areas

• Availability: Not released
• Published by: Joint Nature Conservation Committee
• Last updated: 08 July 2026
• Topic: Not added
• Licence: None

Summary

This spreadsheet contains information on all UK OSPAR Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) that have been nominated to the OSPAR Commission.

The OSPAR Commission is promoting the establishment of a network of well-managed MPAs in the North-East Atlantic. JNCC and the other Statutory Nature Conservation Bodies have assessed the existing MPAs in UK waters (under both European and national conservation legislation) and identified those suitable for nomination as OSPAR MPAs. OSPAR MPAs in the UK therefore form all or part of an existing UK protected area, up to mean high water (or mean high water springs in Scotland). These include Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) with marine components, Special Protection Areas (SPAs) with marine components, Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs) and Nature Conservation Marine Protected Areas (NCMPAs).

This spreadsheet demonstrates the relationship between an MPA's OSPAR status and its underpinning or 'equivalent' UK designation; data on the OSPAR status of MPAs is provided in columns A-G and data on the underlying UK MPA designation is shown in columns H-J.

Please note that this spreadsheet also includes an OSPAR MPA submitted by the UK on behalf of the Isle of Man in 2012 (Ramsey Marine Nature Reserve). The Isle of Man is part of the UK contracting party under the OSPAR Convention.

This dataset is supported by a shapefile available at: http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/ProtectedSites/SACselection/gis_data/terms_conditions.asp

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• Added to data.gov.uk: 2018-06-12
• Access contraints: No limitations
• Harvest GUID: 74ed1478-5cf2-4914-b8cd-8cc7aeb1e13b
• Extent: Latitude: 60.879231° to °
• Extent: Longitude: -19.25° to 3.249861°
• Dataset reference date: 2018-05-10 (publication)
• Responsible party: Digital and Data Solutions, JNCC (distributor)
• ISO 19139 resource type: dataset
• Metadata language: eng
• Source Metadata: XML
• Source Metadata: HTML

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