Zoning of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves in Europe

UNESCO biosphere reserves are committed to a unique concept of sustainable land use deploying gradients of land use intensity from strict nature conservation in core zones to socio-culturally sustainable activity in transition areas. Cross-regional research on benefits and trade-offs that may arise from the management of biosphere reserves is one important goal of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme. So far such research has been challenging due to the lack of a comprehensive spatial dataset covering the different zones reflecting different management restrictions of biosphere reserves. As aimed for in the Lima action plan, analyses of biosphere reserves as functioning models for working landscapes, can give relevant insights into their potential to balance biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. To fill this gap, we present a spatial dataset of European biosphere reserves (BRs) including their zones. The dataset can serve as a basis for analysing the effect of the zoning concept in order to fulfill the different functions that are specified by the Man and Biosphere programme. The dataset was compiled by integrating spatial data from various sources into one uniform dataset with standardised attributes.

List of data and content

• BR_list_details: list of BRs as text file (*.csv)
• Vector_Data: boundaries of BRs incl. zonation as vector files (*.shp, *.geojson)
• LICENSE: details on the license as text file (*.txt)

License
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Spatial reference
Vector data is projected in Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection (EPSG:3035)

Data sources and processing
For details on underlying data sources and on data processing please refer to the csv file and the linked publication.

Acknowledgments
We thank UNESCO-MAB and UNEP-WCMC for advice on zoning data collection. We thank all national agencies, organisations and reserve administrations for providing data.

Related publication
Palliwoda, J., Büermann, A., Fischer, J., Kraemer, R., Schröter, M (2021). Zoning of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves: a comprehensive set of geodata for Europe. Front. Ecol. Evol. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2021.736358.