The European inventory of Nationally designated areas holds information about designated areas and their designation types, which directly or indirectly create protected areas. The data is delivered by the Eionet partnership countries as spatial and tabular information.

The inventory began in 1995 under the CORINE programme of the European Commission. The Nationally designated areas is now an agreed annual Eionet core data flow maintained by the European Environment Agency (EEA) with support from the European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity (ETC/BD). The dataset is used by the EEA and e.g. the UNEP-WCMC for their main European and global assessments, products and services.

The Nationally designated areas is the official source of protected area information from the 38 European* countries to the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA). The Nationally designated areas data can be queried online in the European Nature Information System (EUNIS).

This metadata refers to the internal version of the Nationally designated areas dataset version 20 (2022). EEA does not have permission to distribute some or all sites reported by Estonia, Ireland and Türkiye. The public version dataset is available with the title "Nationally designated areas for public access - version 19, Jun. 2020", which is derived from this dataset.

Two versions of the dataset are provided. The full dataset ("Nationally-designated-areas_2022_v01_internal") includes the entire geographical coverage including nationally designated areas in overseas entities. The "Nationally-designated-areas_2022_v01_internal_EuropeEPSG3035" version includes only continental Europe, i.e. excludes the overseas entities. Both versions are provided in GDB and GPKG formats.

The dataset is accompanied by the following tabular data: Nationally-designated-areas_2022_v01_internal_DesignationType.csv, which contains information about designation types and the national and international legislative instruments, which directly or indirectly create protected designated areas in Europe. The Nationally-designated-areas_2022_v01_public_DesignatedArea.csv, which includes information on the nationally designated sites and designated boundaries, is the same file as in the public version of this dataset, but it is also included.

* Including Kosovo (UNSCR 1244/99), which designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence.