Shapefile with protected areas of India

[javier gonzalez]

Hi,

I know this question was posted some time ago, but the solution doesnt work anymore. I am looking for good quality polygons of the protected areas of India, in particular national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.

Unfortunately, those from protected planet are not so good. Also, the link (http://210.212.84.122/wii-pan-client/LoginForm.aspx) for the wii (Wildlife Institute of India) is not working anymore for me. I have already digitalized some polygons based on notifications and maps, but the process is quite time consuming.

I am looking for this information in order to compare the conservation effectiveness in several countries of the tropics. 

Thanks,

Javier Patino

[Arun Ganesh]

Hi Javier, there are a lot of protected areas that were mapped on OpenStreetMap recently and maybe quite useful.

Have made a query that extracts this and gives over 500+ national parks and sanctuaries: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/NPW 

Since the query is by bbox, you might have to manually remove the ones outside India using qgis or ogr2ogr. It might also be useful if you could evaluate the data and say how complete it might be.

[Arun Ganesh]

Just found the mapping coverage page on the OSM wiki and it looks like most national parks and sanctuaries have been mapped https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/India/Protected_areas

[Arun Ganesh]

Few more resources if you have QGIS and connect to these WFS Servers:

- ENVIS server has protected areas layer with 609 features. This seems like the official data source to use. http://210.212.84.122:80/erdas-apollo/vector/WII_GEOGRAPHIC_DATA

- india Biodiversity Portal seem to have a layer with community protected areas plus lots of other shapefiles thats more focused on the western ghats: https://indiabiodiversity.org/geoserver/ows?version=1.0.0

[Arun Ganesh]

Out of curiosity quickly compared the data quality in ENVIS and OSM and it seems NEVIS might generally have more accurate boundaries, While OSM might be more updated and contain newer areas that might not be there in the ENVIS dataset and protected areas beyond NP and WLS.

ENVIS is maybe accurate to 1-2kms. Here you can see some comparison of ENVIS(dotted green), OSM (solid green) of Sanjay Gandhi NP to satellite imager in Mumbai

[javier gonzalez]

Thanks Arun. Even though I knew the datasets, I didnt know the WFS links. They are awesome.

Well, in my opition after analyzing several sources and gazette notifications for India:

WPAD (protected planet): useless

OSM: not so good and consistent

ENVIS: good for some areas but not existent, wrong or not well georeferenced for many areas

I assume that the best sources are the respective environmental/forest departments of the individual states, but unfortunately they don't publish that data.

Another good and serious source seem to be the ESZ notifications from the Ministry of Enviroment and Forest, but you really need to digitalize everything.

Javier

[Ashish Suman]

Hii,

I have checked that, the posted WII link is not working for now, could someone help me with the latest link for WII or any other reliable dataset with the latest number of protected area network shapefile.