Request Protect Area (PA) of India shape files

[Robin Vijayan]

Hello

I wanted to check if anyone has access to/ can share a recent Protected Area (Wildlife) map India.

We do have the version from https://www.protectedplanet.net/en/thematic-areas/wdpa?tab=WDPA 

But that is dated, and does not have Sanctuaries added in 2018 and 2019.

I did try to get this from Forest Survey of India (by paying any fees required), but they indicated they cannot share as each state forest department had shared this with them, and so they asked us to contact each state for their files. 

I was wondering if there’s a simpler solution/ resource?

I thought this should be information available on the public domain, but we cannot locate it so far.

Do let me know if you have any leads at all.

Cheers

Robin

V. V. Robin
www.skyisland.in
+91 9449002297 

Twitter @vvrobin

Assistant Professor
Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER) Tirupati

Karakambadi Road, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh India 517507

www.iisertirupati.ac.in 

[Pradeep]

Hello Robin,

I had spent some time looking for this for a project I was part of a couple of years ago, and from what I had found then, such a government source did not exist. Curious if things have changed now (they haven't, afaik) and, if so, whether anyone here can shed some light on it.

For our project, we gathered boundary files from a network of people/orgs who work broadly in this field. We then cleaned the data as best as we could, and published what we finally managed, so, although no government source, see if it is of use to you DOI:10.17632/6jhr4xfs3x.1#file-48675100-c852-4847-82eb-82c5afe64454

The data gathering and cleaning work was thanks to a team of then-colleagues behind a larger SNAPP project. It has a data portal now, but looks like the PAs layer is not offered for download there. FYI, what we used and published above is an intermediate version of this SNAPP project effort.

-Pradeep

[Robin]

Thanks Pradeep, will look this up and let you know.

Cheers

Robin

[Arun Ganesh]

Thanks for sharing Pradeep! Another source for the protected areas is OpenStreetMap which also has partial coverage of varying quality.

Out of curiosity, made a quick map with the SNAPP shapefiles (cyan) from Pradeep and OSM data (green) for comparison:

https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/planemad/ckjtfl4bv0aq419p6x72ubdm3.html?fresh=true&title=copy&access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoicGxhbmVtYWQiLCJhIjoiemdYSVVLRSJ9.g3lbg_eN0kztmsfIPxa9MQ#7.05/18.671/74.956