Coastal Protected Areas in the Anthropocene: An inventory of reconnection projects to the sea and alternative management strategies in Europe (RECOSEA)

Over the past 50 years, nature conservation has greatly increased along the European coastlines, reflecting both a strong diversification of protection frameworks (Nature Reserves, National Parks, Natura 2000…) and an increase in the number of protected areas. Conservation projects have been then implemented by various stakeholders with many different targets (birds, ecosystems, habitats, landscapes…) but have been progressively threatened by climate change, and especially by sea level rise and storms intensity. Given their long history of land reclamation, coastal wetlands are here particularly affected. In such a context, nature conservation projects and strategies have increasingly shifted by planning to reconnect all or part of the areas concerned to the sea or by letting nature take its course (Andreu-Boussut and Chadenas, 2022), or less frequently by reinforcing coastal defences. In other words, nature conservation strategies and practices are progressively dealing with coastline protection and managed realignment in order to restore intertidal habitats and to provide ecosystem services such as protection from flooding or carbon storage. This dataset therefore provides an inventory of these alternative conservation projects, already implemented or in the process of implementation, categorized by a typology ranging from strategies of maintaining and defending the current coastline, strategies of adaptation by managed realignment, strategies of ecological restoration and strategies of less intervention and do nothing approaches (Chadenas and al., 2021; de la Vega and al., 2025). 307 conservation projects have been collected up to April 2024 in eight countries: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain. Each project is unique and tailor-made and may combine several methods and different strategies in a more or less complex way. This dataset was initiated within the WILD EUROPE research project (https://eso.cnrs.fr/fr/node/projet-de-recherche/8901/7444/towards-wilder-europe; https://alliance-europa.eu/en/project/wild-europe-towards-a-wilder-europe/) and the typology of scenarios was then tested in the PEDALO research project (https://letg.cnrs.fr/recherche/pedalo-les-espaces-naturels-proteges-dans-le-contexte-du-changement-global-auront-ils-les-pieds-dans-leau/). The database was finally completed within the Horizon Europe REWRITE research project (https://rewriteproject.eu/).