Priority areas for conservation, strict protection and restoration in Europe

We provide a spatially explicit dataset of priority areas for biodiversity conservation, strict protection, and ecosystem restoration across Europe, supporting area-based biodiversity targets under the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. We used multi-criteria spatial prioritisation with the prioritizr R package to identify priority areas for: the expansion of protected areas to reach 30% coverage in Europe, the expansion of strictly protected areas to reach 10% of strict protection, and ecosystem restoration for 20% of European land. We developed multiple variant scenarios that differ in input data, objectives and criteria for site selection. These different variant scenarios account for species and habitats distributions, ecosystem services, socio-economic costs, ecological connectivity, climate change resilience, and different baseline protected areas (Natura 2000 only or all designations), and also explore different constraints for allocating area for conservation and restoration among European countries and biogeographic regions. This dataset was developed within Task 7.3 of the NaturaConnect project and integrates datasets produced across NaturaConnect Work Packages 3--7: species distribution models, habitat distribution models, ecosystem services maps, European land systems and land use change scenarios, climate-resilient areas of high biodiversity importance, functional and structural connectivity, socio-economic opportunity costs. We leveraged this high-resolution European-wide spatial data in a multi-criteria spatial optimisation framework to identify spatial priority areas for conservation and restoration. Biodiversity features considered in the prioritisation are species and habitats that are listed in the Birds and Habitats directive as well as those assessed as threatened and near-threatened in the IUCN red list, and any other species endemic to Europe. All old-growth and primary forests were fully included in the selected priority sites for conservation and strict protection across all variant scenarios, in line with EU policy guidance for strict protection. The dataset consists of gridded raster layers (GeoTIFF), and includes: existing protected areas with different types (allPA, N2K, StPA). Raster grid values indicate the fraction of 1 x 1 km grid cell covered by a protected area. raw spatial prioritisation outputs under variant scenarios for conservation, strict protection and restoration. ZIP files contain individual variant prioritisation outputs for each of the three objectives. Raster grid values indicate the fraction of 1 x 1 km grid cell selected as a top priority for the planning objective. integrated priority maps across multiple objectives, including consensus priority areas across a range of variant scenarios. Details of the planning criteria for each variant scenario are detailed in the variants_description.csv file. The spatial coverage includes EU Member States plus the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and non-EU Balkan countries. All layers are provided at 1 km x 1 km spatial resolution. Further details are available in the README (docx) file. A description of methods can be found in the General NaturaConnect Prioritisation Methods PDF file.