The inventory began under the CORINE programme. It is now maintained for EEA by the European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity and is annually updated through Eionet. EEA provides the European inventory of nationally designated areas to the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA) and to Eurostat. The nationally designated areas data can also be queried online in the European Nature Information System (EUNIS). The inventory is the national module of the Common Database on Designated Areas (CDDA) which also includes information on areas designated under European Community legislation and areas designated under international conventions. A poster describing the CDDA is available at: http://biodiversity-chm.eea.europa.eu/information/document/EEA/1082987029.

Release note for version 8: 34 countries updated their information on legislative instruments, sites and site boundaries in the 2009 Eionet data collection. Information for European countries outside Eionet has been included from the 2009 version of WDPA. A quality report on version 8 is available, in particular on the quality of data from the Eionet countries. There has been a revision of the data format with the removal of items which it was agreed have little value at the European level. For the first time Eionet countries were asked to report in 2009 on their total protected area (terrestrial and marine). This is a step towards improving comparability between aggregated information published at national and European level and it is expected that the values made available for some countries will be revised in future releases of the data set.

This information is from the European Common Database on Designated Areas established and managed collaboratively by the European Environment Agency, the UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the Council of Europe, based on data provided by national sources

Geographical coverage GIS vector boundary data: Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey. EEA does not have permission to distribute some or all sites reported by Austria, Estonia, Finland, Great Britain, Greece and the Netherlands. Copyright has to be mentioned for Estonia, Germany and Slovenia.