Areas of high ecological value

This layer contains information on the location and characteristics of areas with a high ecological value in coastal regions as defined by the Eurosion project.

Because of restrictions in accessing the most updated and accurate information on areas of high ecological areas (provided by Member States in the framework of the Habitats Directive), the following approach has been adopted by Eurosion: - in a first stage, data on areas of high ecological value will be derived from CORINE Biotopes. The data depict the location of major nature sites in Europe (NB: only coordinates of centroids are provided, not the geographical boundaries of the sites). The characteristics of these sites in terms of size, number of species hosted by the sites, or legal status are provided as attributes of the centroids. This makes it possible cartographic representation in the forms of bubbles (see screenshots). - in a second stage, the above mentioned Biotopes database will be progressively replaced by the database of proposed Sites of Community Interest (pSCI) - which is being established in the framework of the Habitats Directive and Natura 2000 network (as data become public). For the time being, only pSCIs for the Macaronesian ecoregion (Canary, Azores, Madeira) are publicly available, which makes impossible any exploitation of these data for European-wide applications.