High Quality Data for Nature Policy

Assessment of the major errors detected from Member States' Natura 2000 databases until 1 September 2023

Introduction

The Natura 2000 data (site borders and sites’ Standard Data Forms) are extremely important to monitor the implementation of the nature directives, to appreciate the investments at Member State level to establish the Natura 2000 network and contribute to the assessment of the state of nature in Europe.

In spite of the automated quality checks put in place on Reportnet, we still find too many errors in the European database, making the extraction of information sometimes difficult or even impossible in the worst cases.

We therefore carried out an assessment of the major errors we could detect for all Member States and created error dashboards from the most recent envelope we received from you (until 1 September 2023). The tests are meant to be able to detect more error cases than the QAQC available from Reportnet.

Analysis of errors in Special Area of Conservation (SAC) date fields

The errors are listed based on the following assumptions

The SAC date cannot be earlier than the SCI date This error was found for AT, DE, EE, ES, LV, SI, and SK. We also flagged SAC designation dates that occurred in the same year as the SCI designation: we recommend CY, CZ and DK to double check these dates.

The SAC date cannot be earlier than 1994 or in the future. This error was found for BE, BG and DE.

For the listed countries: please check the SDF of the sites listed in the excel table.

For all Member States: we recommend you to recheck all dates as we can only detect errors that break a logical rule. We checked only the subset of sites where the SCI confirmation date was provided.

Last updated: 21.09.2023