Marine Protected Areas (MPA) Inventory 2023-2024

The NOAA MPA Inventory represents a collection of data compiled from various federal, state, tribal and territorial entities to provide a publicly available source of comprehensive information on place-based marine conservation efforts under U.S. federal, state, territorial, local, and tribal jurisdiction.

The NOAA MPA Inventory (v2023) is a comprehensive catalog that provides detailed information for existing marine protected areas in the United States. The inventory provides geospatial boundary information (in polygon format) and classification attributes that seek to define the conservation objectives, protection level, governance and related management criteria for all sites in the database. The comprehensive inventory of federal, state and territorial MPA sites provides governments and stakeholders with access to information to make better decisions about the current and future use of place-based conservation.

NOTE that as of 2020, the MPA Inventory includes IUCN MPAs only. IUCN MPAs are those sites that meet the IUCN definition of protected area as published in 2008 guidelines: 'A protected area is a clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the longterm conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values'.

The MPA Center shall not be held liable for improper or incorrect use of the data described and/or contained in this database. These data and related graphics are not legal documents and are not intended to be used as such.The information contained in these data is dynamic and may change over time. The data are not better than the original sources from which they were derived. It is the responsibility of the data user to use the data appropriately and within the limitations of geospatial data in general, and these data in particular.

These data are publicly accessible and downloadable via http://marineprotectedareas.noaa.gov/dataanalysis/mpainventory/

These data are in the Public domain. The data are not to be used for navigation.

Data were collected from variety of federal and state geospatial sources and integrated into one data product. As of the 2020 version, the MPA Inventory provides boundary and classification information exclusively for MPAs that meet the international protected area definition established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). IUCN protected areas are defined as:

A clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated, and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.

Data were collected from various sources at various spatial scales. The datasets collected were not resampled and are presented in their original form as provided from the contributing agencies, with the exception for a variety of sites that were digitized from coordinates provided by governing agencies.

This version of the MPA Inventory contains geospatial boundaries for 979 marine protected areas. New and/or altered sites that are not currently present in the database will be added as data are made available.