What is a Special Protection Area?

A Special Protection Area is a site classified to protect rare, vulnerable and migratory wild birds and their habitats. Classification follows the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, which retains the Birds Directive in UK law, plus the equivalent devolved regulations.

Which nations are covered?

All four: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The data reconciles the registers held by Natural England, NatureScot, Natural Resources Wales and DAERA's Northern Ireland Environment Agency into one schema with one identity per site.

How current is the data?

The dataset is refreshed monthly from the four custodian registers. Each record carries its designated and amended dates, with a date_precision flag so a year-only source value is never served as an exact day.

Under the Open Government Licence v3.0, sourced from named public-sector custodians, with per-custodian attribution returned on every record. The product excludes non-OGL sources to keep commercial reuse clean.

Read-only over REST at /v1/conservation. Query by point, radius, bounding box or polygon, fetch a single site by stable id, or list the type vocabulary for free. It is an annual licence, not pay-per-call.

Is the geometry standardised across nations?

Yes. Every site is reprojected server-side from its source grid to EPSG:4326 (WGS84), so coordinates are consistent whether the record comes from England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

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Conservation & Nature

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Special Protection Areas (SPA)

Every UK Special Protection Area for wild birds, from the four national nature bodies. Candidate (potential) SPAs flagged via a status field, each with a stable id and EPSG:4326 geometry.

289

Sites

Nations

EPSG:4326

Geometry

OGL v3.0

Licence

Overview

About this dataset

A Special Protection Area (SPA) is a site classified to protect rare, vulnerable and migratory wild birds and the habitats they depend on. This dataset holds every classified SPA across the United Kingdom in a single schema, with one stable identity per site and a point you can map.

The statutory basis is the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, which retains the Birds Directive in domestic law, together with the equivalent devolved regulations. Four public bodies classify and maintain the registers: Natural England in England (88), NatureScot in Scotland (around 164), Natural Resources Wales in Wales (around 21) and DAERA's Northern Ireland Environment Agency (16).

We reconcile those four registers into one schema and one identity scheme. Geometry is reprojected server-side from each source's native grid to EPSG:4326 (WGS84), so coordinates stay consistent across all four nations. Query by point, radius, bounding box or polygon over REST, or fetch a single designation by its stable id.

Potential SPAs (pSPAs), sites government has proposed but not yet classified, are folded in and flagged as candidate through a status field, so you can include or exclude them deliberately. Every record carries Open Government Licence v3.0 provenance with per-custodian attribution, keeping commercial reuse clean.

What's included

Everything in the box

Spatial queries over REST

Query SPAs by point, radius, bounding box or polygon, or fetch one site by its stable id.

Four registers, one schema

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland reconciled into a single record shape with one stable identity per site.

Candidate sites flagged

Potential SPAs are included and marked as candidate through a status field, so proposed sites never read as classified.

EPSG:4326 geometry

Every site is reprojected server-side from its source grid to valid WGS84 coordinates ready to map.

OGL provenance per record

Each record carries Open Government Licence v3.0 with per-custodian attribution for clean commercial reuse.

Welsh bilingual names

Welsh site names are returned in a name_cy field where the custodian publishes them.

Data fields

What each record carries

schema14 fields

reference: string// Source register reference for the SPA.

nation: enum// UK nation: ENG, SCO, WAL or NIR.

source: string// Custodian that classifies and maintains the record.

name: string// Official site name.

name_cy: string// Welsh site name where published by the custodian.

designation_type: enum// Designation type, here special_protection_area.

status: enum// Classification status: classified or candidate (potential SPA).

designated_date: date// Date the site was classified.

amended_date: date// Date of the most recent boundary or status amendment.

date_precision: enum// Precision of the served dates: day, month, year or none.

local_authority: string// Local authority the site falls within.

area_hectares: float// Classified area in hectares.

centroid: object// Representative point in EPSG:4326 (WGS84) as lat/lng.

attribution: string// Required attribution statement for the source custodian.

Sample response

Straight from the API

response.jsonapplication/json

{
  "id": "design.conservation.SCO.special_protection_area.UK9004411",
  "reference": "UK9004411",
  "nation": "SCO",
  "source": "NatureScot",
  "name": "Firth of Forth",
  "name_cy": null,
  "designation_type": "special_protection_area",
  "status": "classified",
  "category": "Special Protection Area",
  "designated_date": "1990-12-01",
  "amended_date": "2014-03-19",
  "date_precision": "day",
  "local_authority": "City of Edinburgh",
  "area_hectares": 6313.6,
  "source_url": "https://sitelink.nature.scot/site/8497",
  "centroid": {
    "lat": 56.0123,
    "lng": -3.1456
  },
  "licence": "OGL-UK-3.0",
  "attribution": "Contains NatureScot data, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0"
}

Use cases

What people build with it

Site due diligence before acquisition

Screen a development site or land parcel against classified and candidate SPAs early, so Habitats Regulations risk surfaces before commitment.

Developers

Planning constraint checks

Test applications against SPA boundaries and proximity to flag where a Habitats Regulations Assessment or appropriate assessment is required.

Planners

Lending environmental due diligence

Flag SPA exposure on a security address as part of environmental checks on development and portfolio lending.

Lenders

ESG and biodiversity screening

Screen land holdings against protected wild-bird habitats for biodiversity and ESG reporting.

Investors