National Parks and Wildlife Service designated area spatial data has been updated as of January 2024
Changes to site boundaries and additional sites, since the data was last published in November 2023, are listed below.
| County | Sitecode | Sitename | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Co. Cavan | 000007 | Lough Oughter and Associated Loughs SAC | 3.03 |
| Co. Carlow, Co. Wexford and Co. Wicklow | 000781 | Slaney River Valley SAC | 3.03 |
| Co. Galway and Co. Mayo | 001774 | Lough Carra/Mask Complex SAC | 3.03 |
| Co. Kerry | 002031 | Blackwater River (Kerry) SAC | 3.01 |
| County | Sitecode | Sitename | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Co. Waterford and Co.Wexford | 004237 | Seas off Wexford cSPA | 3.00 |
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) | 11/01/2024 | Link to ISDE metadata record | SAC_ITM_2024_01 (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.