UK Designated Sites

Every protected nature site in Great Britain, in one place.

Ramsar sites, Special Areas of Conservation, Special Protection Areas, SSSIs and Local Nature Reserves in England, Scotland and Wales are published by three different agencies on different websites. This brings them together: what each designation means, how the law protects it in each country, and a live map of every site with links to the official citation. Priority habitats and the Woodland Trust's ancient and veteran trees are on the map too.

Which designated sites are near my site?

Drop a pin (or enter a postcode or grid reference), or upload a development's red line boundary as a GeoPackage, shapefile, GeoJSON or KML. Choose your buffer distances, for example 1, 2 and 5 km, and get a summary of every Ramsar site, SAC, SPA, SSSI and LNR within each distance, with the distance to each one, plus the priority habitats nearby. You can download a PDF report with a map (sites, habitats, ancient trees, buffer rings, legend, scale bar) and full tables, or export the list as CSV.

On the map you can also switch on priority habitats (England and Wales) and use the 📏 Measure tool to measure distances, starting from your pin if you've dropped one.

Open the buffer search

How the designations fit together

Sites are protected at three levels. The same land often carries several designations at once: almost every Ramsar site, and SACs and SPAs on land, are also SSSIs, which gives them their underlying legal protection.

Legal protection at a glance

The headline protections in Great Britain. Open any designation for the full position in England, Scotland and Wales, with links to the legislation.

Data sources and freshness

This site doesn't store its own copy of the data. Each time a page opens, it asks each agency's official live service directly, so new sites and boundary changes appear here automatically as soon as the agency publishes them. The dates below come from those services.

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Automatic change log

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About

Northern Ireland sites are not included. This site covers England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland's protected sites (ASSIs, SACs, SPAs and Ramsar sites) are published by DAERA, whose map service doesn't respond to requests from many locations, so they can't be shown reliably here. Find them on DAERA's Natural Environment Map Viewer or DAERA's protected areas search.

Boundaries are indicative and simplified for display; distances in the buffer search are measured against boundaries simplified to a few metres. Always check the official source before relying on a boundary for a formal assessment. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0: © Natural England; © NatureScot; © Natural Resources Wales. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right.

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