About this data

Natura 2000 is an ecological network composed of sites designated under the Birds Directive (Special Protection Areas, SPAs) and the Habitats Directive (Sites of Community Importance, SCIs, and Special Areas of Conservation, SACs).

For each Natura 2000 site, national authorities have submitted a standard data form (SDF) that contains an extensive description of the site and its ecology. The European Topic Centre for Biological Diversity (ETC/BD), based in Paris, is responsible for validating this data and creating an EU wide descriptive database.

The European database on Natura 2000 sites consists of data submitted by Member States to the European Commission. This data is subject to a regular validation and updating process. After validation a new EU-wide Natura 2000 database is released. The date of release of a new EU-wide database does not guarantee that the data has been regularly and uniformly updated by Member States.

The spatial data (borders of sites) submitted by each Member State is validated by the European Environment Agency (EEA) and linked to the descriptive data. Any problems identified during this process are brought to the attention of the concerned Member States. The spatial data is then generalized to a scale of 1/100000 and is integrated into the database. Please note therefore that the displayed sites may be less precise than the ones sent to the European Commission. In certain cases this may result, when zooming in closely, in a certain shift with regard to the underlying map. Re-projection from the data's original projection may also accentuate this shift.

Please note that some Member States have submitted sensitive information that has been filtered out of this database. The following Member States have submitted sensitive information: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia, Romania and Sweden. This concerns mainly species associated to specific sites. All reference to these species has been removed from the related sites. Certain descriptive fields, possibly mentioning the presence of these species, have also been removed. If this sensitive information is necessary to your field of research, please contact the Member States' administrations individually. You can find a compiled list of national or regional Natura 2000 websites at the following address:
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/natura2000/db_gis/index_en.htm#sites

Background maps used in the viewer have been supplied by Bing Maps (© 2012 Microsoft).
Operational maps are produced by the European Environment Agency (EEA) and published at (discomap.eea.europa.eu):

The Geocoder is powered by Google Technology.

For more information on this Natura 2000 database please contact:

Consolidated database released on: May 2012