Open Protected Areas
Open Protected Areas is an independently reproducible compilation of protected-area boundaries from authoritative sources that permit the intended reuse and redistribution.
The product is provenance-first. Every published feature is bound to a source record, source family, observed version, geometry identity, licence, and attribution. Missing coverage is represented explicitly and never interpreted as the absence of protected areas.
What a release contains
- content-addressed GeoParquet partitions;
- a machine-readable source and licence registry;
- country-level coverage states and limitations;
- schema and classification documentation;
- complete source attribution;
- an immutable manifest with artifact sizes and SHA-256 digests.
Different source partitions may carry different open-data terms. The release therefore does not assert a single compilation-wide data licence. Consumers must preserve the notices attached to the partitions they use.
Coverage semantics
Each jurisdiction is reported as one of:
covered— its declared minimum authoritative source suite is present;partial— useful qualifying geometry is present but a declared source
family or scope remains open;
unknown— adequate qualifying geometry or evidence has not yet been established;verified_empty— an authoritative current register explicitly establishes
that the in-scope register is empty.
These states describe the release contract, not the legal status of an individual location. Local due diligence remains necessary for construction, permitting, or investment decisions.
Status
The current public release is ab13b044ff38845dff6abd1a. Its files, documentation, streaming map, complete archive, and integrity manifest are available from the Open Protected Areas dataset page.
This repository is the public product and verification boundary. The internal acquisition and legal-audit repository remains the production authority for assembling future releases; only exports that pass the release and equivalence gates enter this repository and the public dataset.
See the release contract and publication boundary. The latest standalone verification evidence is recorded in equivalence.
Verification client
This repository contains the standalone release verifier and deterministic archive tools:
uv sync
uv run open-protected-areas verify /path/to/<release-id>
uv run pytestThe client checks immutable part hashes, the complete schema, source and licence identities, geometry validity, feature uniqueness, coverage counts, and manifest totals. Acquisition and legal-review workflows remain outside this public-edition boundary.