Ramsar site

Ramsar sites are wetland wildlife conservation areas nominated by states parties to the convention signed at Ramsar, Iran in 1971.

Shape Files

The secretariat of the convention, has confirmed that GIS shape files of Ramsar sites are in the public domain: osm-talk.

Shapefiles are available at (registration required) for the following European countries: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Sweden, Switzerland.

Datasets for other countries are visible on the Wetlands International site, but have not been made available for download. In some cases, e.g., the United Kingdom, this is likely to be for copyright reasons. Shapefiles are prepared by the countries themselves, so they may vary in the format of the shp-file (UTM, GEO,...)

Tagging

The precise tagging of the wide range of different categories of sites for nature conservation has not been worked out in any detail. Therefore this is only a tentative suggestion of how to tag Ramsar sites.

Sites should be tagged leisure=nature_reserve, and possibly landuse=conservation (see Proposed features/conservation), with an additional ramsar=yes. Care should be taken to not cause conflict with existing tags of a similar nature. Many Ramsar sites may contain explicit nature reserves (owned by conservation bodies) with different boundaries to the Ramsar site.

In addition Ramsar sites may be covered by other conservation categories, such as SSSI status in Great Britain, and SAC and SPAs in the European Union. A good example of this is Rutland Water, where the western shore is a nature reserve operated by the local Wildlife Trust and Anglian Water, and the whole reservoir is an SSSI, an SPA, and a Ramsar site.

Countries

Links

• Ramsar sites by country and with centre-point coordinates
• Ramsar sites in order of their designation
• Shape files (registration required)