Special Protection Areas (SPAs) are part of the Natura 2000 network of European sites, designated in accordance with the EU Birds Directive (79/409/EEC), to protect various threatened and migratory bird species.

SPA boundaries are mapped using the Irish Grid or Irish Transverse Mercator (epsg 2157) co-ordinate systems. Details of the co-ordinate system for each SPA site can be found in the attribute table.

This is a national dataset.

Public Dashboards
No dashboard exists for this dataset.

Data Resources (4)

SHP / ZIP
available as zip
HTML
available as html
WFS
available as WFS
ESRI REST
available as esri rest
Data Owner Email datadelivery@housing.gov.ie
Theme Environment
Date released 2026-02-13
Date updated 2026-02-23
Dataset conforms to these standards The INSPIRE Directive or INSPIRE lays down a general framework for a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for the purposes of European Community environmental policies and policies or activities which may have an impact on the environment.
Rights notes {http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/,"Copyright Government of Ireland. This dataset was created by National Parks and Wildlife Service, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. This copyright material is licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",otherRestrictions}
Update frequency Other
Language English
Landing page https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/edf34d92e28040fd87d3d14f55d8d95f/
Geographic coverage in GeoJSON format {"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-10.56, 51.39],[-10.56, 55.43], [-5.34, 55.43], [-5.34, 51.39], [-10.56, 51.39]]]}
Spatial Reference Systems (SRS) Irish Transverse Mercator (ITM, EPSG:2157)
Vertical Extent {"verticalDomainName": "EPSG Projection 5731 - Malin Head height", "minVerticalExtent": "0", "maxVerticalExtent": "1014"}
Provenance information This spatial dataset and associated web services is currently presented in Irish Transverse Mercator projection. The majority of site boundaries were originally digitised from Ordnance Survey of Ireland 1:10560 six-inch raster data in Irish Grid. Over time an increasing number of site boundaries in this dataset will be replotted to Ordnance Survey of Ireland 1:5000 vector mapping in Irish Transverse Mercator. The spatial dataset and associated web services contain two feature level metadata fields: SOURCE_SCALE AND SOURCE_CRS to identify the source scale and projection that the site boundary feature is derived from.
High Value Dataset (HVD) No