Global Coastal Heritage Dataset (Glo-CoH)

The Global Coastal Heritage Dataset (Glo-CoH) contains digitised boundary extents of heritage sites inscribed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as World Heritage properties of universal and outstanding value that occur along the global coastline under 20 m Above Mean Sea Level (AMSL), a total of 1,249 individual serial sites covering the breadth of designated cultural, natural and mixed heritage sites and encompassing an area over 235 million hectares. A programme of site digitisation utilised extant site plans and Google Earth worldwide satellite imagery to locate and digitise heritage site boundaries. The quality of the resulting dataset was assessed by applying a mixed qualitative/quantitative validation procedure to a stratified sub-sample, encompassing the quality of source material, site identification, visibility and digitising accuracy. The validation procedure suggests 92% of digitized sites obtain validation scores indicative of optimal digitisation accuracy. The data set is made publically available for geo-spatial analysis and intended for use by researchers and practitioners looking to assess or plan environmental, climatic, economic, infrastructural and societal dimensions relating to coastal heritage at site, city, regional and global scales.The digitised polygons are available in ESRI shape file and GeoPackage GIS formats. The dataset contains polygons representing cultural (990), natural (204) and mixed (17) World Heritage sites meeting the 20m AMSL criteria. Individual elements of composite or serial World Heritage Sites meeting the 20m AMSL criteria are treated as discrete sites. Associated data records (attribute data) consists of a unique site ID number, the UNESCO site designation code, the UNESCO designated name of the site and the name of any individual site elements if different, the area of the site in hectares, the name of the country containing the site along with ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 three-letter country codes and the global sub-region.