A fragmentation assessment of the European protected area network

Here an assessment of the fragmentation of protected areas (both Natura 2000 and CDDA) is made. Provided are estimated at: Site level, e.g. quantified for each individual site. Gridded level, as landscape metrics quantified as aggregate for a set of reference grids. A holistic classification by clustering and combining different site and gridded metrics into a reduced set of categorical classes. In addition to protected area information, we used harmonized land cover data on European ecosystem units (Jung et al. 2025) and data on accessibility to cities (Weiss et al. 2018). File structure: Gridded_metrics_YYYY_XXXX.tif <> Gridded landscape metrics for a given protected area type [YYYY] and spatial grain [XXXX] in GeoTiff format. SiteArchetypes__YYYY__SOM_reclassified.tif <> Protected area fragmentation archetypes for each protected area type [YYYY]. Accopanied by colour legends in QML format (can be opened in QGIS) SummaryStatisticsBySite.zip <> A zipped file containing extracted site-based metrics (in csv format) accompanied by protected area ID and overall summary table. Data properties: File format Geotiff Thematic resolution Continuous and categorical Spatial grain 100 m² to 100 km² Geographic projection LAEA Europe (EPSG: 3035) Temporal grain Single year Spatial extent Continental Europe Temporal extent 2023 Reusability:The maps and data are provided under a CC-BY 4.0 License. All files are provided as is and the authors take no responsibility for errors, or misuse and misinterpretation. .