Since 1981 UNEP-WCMC has ever since 1981 been compiling this information and making it available to the global community. This has been done through their Protected Areas Programme. The WDPA is a joint project of UNEP and IUCN, produced by UNEP-WCMC and the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas working with governments and collaborating NGOs.

They describe their databases this way:

"The World Database on Protected Areas is a foundation dataset for conservation decision making. It contains crucial information from national governments, non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, international biodiversity convention secretariats and many others. It is used for ecological gap analysis, environmental impact analysis and is increasingly used for private sector decision-making."

For their 2010 publication they specifically note the following:

"One of the goals in 2010 is to further develop the standard that will allow the sharing of protected areas data between organizations, countries and industry - ultimately resulting in a globally complete and accurate dataset for protected areas. The new Data Standard will facilitate the comparison and analysis of global protected areas data and will help to speed the updating of the WDPA. In the past year over 40 countries have been updated with over 40,000 sites. The implementation of a more rigorous validation process means that thousands of geometry errors have been identified & corrected and over a thousand duplicate sites have been removed from the WDPA. There are approximately 138,000 sites now available through the WDPA."

We are aware that some of the protected areas for Tanzania in this data set are not always 100% accurate. It is however the only data set providing updated continental level information on a regular basis. As such it is a good starting point for research. For management we would advice the user to contact the ministry (MNRT) for the most updated information.

The undersigned and colleagues are planing to publish a PDF map for free distribution based on this map quite soon. Stay tuned - and in the meantime visit WDPA:

Their website address is here: