CAPAD 2022
Collaborative Australian Protected Areas Database - CAPAD 2022 is now available.
CAPAD, published every 2 years, is used to provide a national perspective of the conservation of biodiversity in protected areas. It also allows Australia to report on the status of protected areas to meet international obligations such as those under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Australian protected area information is also included in the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA).
Under Australia's Strategy for the National Reserve System 2009-2030 all state and territory Governments and the Australian Government agreed to adopt international standards for the definition of a protected area and management categories used by the IUCN.
CAPAD
CAPAD is a textual and spatial database with information available for 1997, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022.
CAPAD 2022 includes 13,903 terrestrial protected areas covering 169,941,262 ha (22.1 per cent) of the Australian landmass. Marine data and information are also available as a separate dataset.
Information available for CAPAD editions:
| Year | Terrestrial | Marine | IBRA | IBRA Subregions | IMCRA |
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| 2022 |
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| 2020 |
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| 2018 |
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| 2016 |
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| 2014 |
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| 2012 |
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| 2010 |
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| 2008 |
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| 1997 |
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The textual data in tabular format is available to all clients accessing this website and can be downloaded in Microsoft Excel format. This information is provided as a national spreadsheet and split into state and territory spreadsheets.
GIS data is available via the Find Environmental Data website and access to the data is via the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence model. The information is available in ArcGIS format.
CAPAD information
CAPAD provides information at a national, state and territory level. For each grouping CAPAD includes information about the following:
- List of all protected areas. This list includes information on IUCN category, location (latitude and longitude of mid-point (centroid)), area (hectares) and gazettal date (the year an area was declared a protected area).
- Protected areas classified according to reservation type designations e.g. National Park, Conservation Covenant, Indigenous Protected Area.
- Protected areas classified according to IUCN management categories e.g. Number of designated Category III protected areas in NSW.
- Protected areas classified according to type designations as a proportion of IBRA (Version 7) regions e.g. the number of type designations within the Victorian Midlands (VM) IBRA region in Victoria and the percentage of those types of protected areas within that region.
- Protected areas classified according to IUCN management categories as a proportion of IBRA region e.g. Number of Category II protected areas in Queensland and the percentage of those IUCN categories within the Queensland IBRA regions.
- The level of protection of IBRA regions.
- The level of protection of IBRA subregions.
- Protected Areas classified according to governance e.g. Government, Joint, Indigenous and Private.
World Database on Protected Areas
The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) is compiled from multiple sources and is the most comprehensive global dataset on marine and terrestrial protected areas available. It is a joint venture of UNEP and IUCN, produced by UNEP-WCMC and the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (IUCN-WCPA) working with governments and collaborating NGOs.
With permission from the data providers the information in CAPAD is provided to the World Database on Protected Areas to assist in measuring progress toward global goals and targets.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations have been used in order to reduce size of the data and to improve viewing on web pages. Full descriptions of the abbreviations are available below: