NOAA Marine Protected Areas Inventory

The NOAA MPA Center's Marine Protected Areas Inventory (v2024, layer NOAA_MPA_Inventory_2023): 981 boundaries of existing marine protected areas under U.S. federal, state, territorial, local and tribal jurisdiction that meet the IUCN definition of a protected area. All 35 native attributes are kept as columns. Two of them are the crosswalk keys to other registries: ProSeasID (ProtectedSeas Navigator site_id) and WDPA_Cd (World Database on Protected Areas id). Fishery management areas and similar are not in the Inventory. Not to be used for navigation; not a legal document (consult the CFR or state code for regulatory boundaries).

• Collection: mpa_inventory v1.0.0, 981 features, GeoParquet 1.1 (places.parquet) and PMTiles (places.pmtiles, layer mpa_inventory)
• Licence: CC-PDDC - U.S. federal government work (NOAA MPA Center). InPort item 69506: "These data are in the Public domain. The data are not to be used for navigation." The ArcGIS item licenseInfo adds: "Data are not to be used for navigation. ... These data and related graphics are not legal documents and are not intended to be used as such." https://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
• Attribution: NOAA National Ocean Service, Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, Marine Protected Areas Center, NOAA Marine Protected Areas Inventory (2024 release). Public domain; not to be used for navigation. Processed by Ocean Metrics.
• Refresh: monthly, by .github/workflows/sync.yml (re-fetched only when the source's editingInfo.dataLastEditDate or record count changed)

Sources and provenance

Machine-readable copy: provenance.json (also in collection.json and the Parquet footer).

Schema

Native attributes keep the source layer's names; a native name equal to a gazetteer column ignoring case (NAME vs name) is suffixed _src.

Files

Quick start

SELECT place_id, name, status, status_date
FROM read_parquet('https://storage.oceanmetrics.io/gazetteer/mpa_inventory/places.parquet')
ORDER BY place_id;

Changes

• 1.0.0: first release.