Catalogue › Constraints, Regulation & Consenting
Scottish protected areas and spatial data
NatureScot, Scottish Government (spatialdata.gov.scot)
- Licence
- Open Government Licence v3.0
- Cost
- Free
- Account needed
- No
- Harvestable
- Automated
What it contains
SSSIs, SACs, SPAs, National Scenic Areas, National Parks, Ramsar for Scotland. Plus Scottish energy layers: Heat Network Locations (Existing and Planned) - Scotland, Heat Demand of Properties by Settlement - Scotland, Green Heat in Greenspaces (GHiGs), Mine Water Geothermal Resource Atlas for Scotland, Groundwater water bodies - Scotland.
When you need it
Useful at these project stages, from the working group's stage matrix:
- Matched on
- Constraints, regulation and consenting data (not a matrix item)
- Assigned by
- Matched to data items the matrix names
Coverage and detail
- Geographic
- Scotland
- Nations
- Scotland
- Resolution
- Polygon
- Formats
- Shapefile, GeoJSON, WMS, WFS
- Update cadence
- Varies
Access and machine route
- Licence as stated
- Open Government Licence v3.0 mostly
- Assertion source
- as published by NatureScot, Scottish Government (spatialdata.gov.scot)
- Protocol
- CSW / WMS / WFS; also CKAN via data.gov.uk federation
- Endpoint
- https://www.spatialdata.gov.scot/
- Harvest note
- yes-automated note recorded in the machine_endpoint field: GeoNetwork/CSW with per layer WMS/WFS also reachable via data.gov.uk CKAN under publisher 'Scottish Government SpatialData.gov.scot' Link check 2026-09-08: automated check blocked by the host; not verified. spatialdata.gov.scot disallows crawling via robots.txt - unverifiable (record pages under it did resolve).
Caveats
Schema differs from Natural England equivalents; designation vocabularies need cross-walking.
Classification
- Category
- Constraints, Regulation & Consenting
- Sub-category
- 4.1 Environmental designations & protected sites
- Assigned by
- Stated by the source
- Depth domain
- Mine workings
- Technology
- Mine water
- Data form
- Raster, Vector
- Evidence confidence
- Not yet assessed. Only a person can set this.
How current this entry is
- Last updated here
- 2026-09-22
- Last checked against the holder
- 2026-09-07
- Checked by a person
- Not yet. Nobody has read this entry.
- Catalogue id
- scottish-protected-areas-and-spatial-data
Open at NatureScot, Scottish Government
Openly licensed. No account needed.
Could not be checked
On 2026-09-08 the holder's site refused the automated request. That is bot protection, not evidence the link is broken, and not evidence it works.
Checked by automated request, not in a browser. A site can answer a script and still fail for a reader, so treat this as a weak signal.
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NatureScot, Scottish Government (spatialdata.gov.scot). Scottish protected areas and spatial data. Accessed via UK Geothermal Data Catalogue, https://catalogue.geothermaluk.org/id/scottish-protected-areas-and-spatial-data/. Record scottish-protected-areas-and-spatial-data.