Download Boundary Data

National Parks and Wildlife Service designated area spatial data has been updated as of May 2024

Changes to site boundaries and additional sites, since the data was last published in January 2024, are listed below.

 

Special Areas of Conservation (SAC)

County Sitecode Sitename Version
Co. Cork and Co. Kerry 002158 Kenmare River SAC   3.08
Co. Galway 002111 Kilkieran Bay and Islands SAC 3.07
Co. Galway 002117 Lough Coy SAC 3.01
Co. Meath and Co. Westmeath 002120 Lough Bane and Lough Glass SAC 3.02

 

NPWS has begun the process of bringing our spatial data into the ITM projection on modern OSI mapping.

These ITM boundaries will be made publicly available once they have been passed into legislation as Statutory Instruments (SI). 

This process will be on-going over the next few years.

NPWS spatial data is now available for download as shapefiles only. Each designation type will have a national shapefile in the Irish Transverse Mercator (ITM) projection.

The SAC and SPA shapefiles now contain a mixture of legacy Irish Grid/1:10,560 and modern ITM/1:5000 data. Most of the data was digitized in the Irish Grid (IG) projection on the OSI ‘Six-Inches-to-One-Mile’ map series.

Our legacy IG/'Six Inch Series' data has been transformed from IG into ITM using the NTv2 polynomial transformation.  Legacy issues regarding the Cassini projections and gaps/overlapping of site boundaries across county boundaries remain.

One exception to this are a number of offshore SAC sites are now available for download in WGS84 (as part of the SAC shapefile download) - these sites are between 100km and 400km offshore approximately.

Changes to the site boundaries are listed in the document 'Changes_to_NPWS_Spatial_data.doc' which is included in each relevant zip file.

The Irish Spatial Data Exchange catalogue will be the main reference point for all NPWS and Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage GIS dataset metadata. End users are encourage to consult ISDE for our latest data updates.

GIS dataset downloads

Designation Update Date ISDE Metadata Record Download Dataset
Special Area of Conservation (SAC) 15/05/2024 Link to ISDE metadata record SAC_ITM_2024_05 (ZIP, 28MB)
Special Protection Area (SPA) 11/01/2024 Link to ISDE metadata record SPA_ITM_2024_01 (ZIP, 11MB)
Natural Heritage Area (NHA) 28/06/2019 Link to ISDE metadata record NHA_ITM_2019_06 (ZIP, 2MB)
proposed Natural Heritage Area (pNHA) 01/11/2015 Link to ISDE metadata record pNHA_ITM_2015_11 (ZIP, 20MB)

 

There have been some changes to the attribute fields.

  • Ha: Area of site in hectares.
  • Source_CRS: Co-ordinate Reference System used in digitizing the source data (ITM or Irish Grid).
  • SourcScale: Scale of base-mapping used (1:5000 or 1:10,560 which corresponds to 6 inches to 1 mile).

GIS Web Services for NPWS Designations

OGC Web Map Service: https://webservices.npws.ie/arcgis/services/NPWS/NPWSDesignatedAreas/MapServer/WMSServer?request=GetCapabilities&service=WMS

ArcGIS REST Web service: https://webservices.npws.ie/arcgis/rest/services/NPWS/NPWSDesignatedAreas/MapServer

 

For bulk summary data on Natura2000 sites visit the Designated Site Data Page for SACs and SPAs.