The dataset on marine and coastal protected areas in the EU was created in 2014 by Cogea for the European Marine Observation and Data Network. The dataset is entirely based on the European Environmental Agency's (EEA) datasets "Natura 2000" and "Nationally designated areas (CDDA)". Natura 2000 is an ecological network composed of sites designated under the Birds Directive (Special Protection Areas, SPAs) and the Habitats Directive (Sites of Community Importance, SCIs, and Special Areas of Conservation, SACs). The Common Database on Designated Areas (CDDA) is more commonly known as Nationally designated areas. The inventory began in 1995 under the CORINE programme of the European Commission. It is now one of the agreed Eionet priority data flows maintained by EEA with support from the European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity. It is a result of an annual data flow through Eionet countries. The EEA publishes the dataset and makes it available to the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA). The CDDA data can also be queried online in the European Nature Information System (EUNIS). Both EEA's datasets have been filtered by Cogea to show only maritime areas and sites (i.e. areas entirely at sea), and coastal areas and sites(internal areas that intersect and/or are tangent, using 1 km buffer, to the marine regions and subregions geographic boundaries shapefile, available at https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/msfd-regions-and-subregions). The CDDA dataset cover the whole EU in the case of Natura 2000 data. In the case of CDDA, geographical coverage of GIS vector boundary data is: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo under UNSC Resolution 1244/99, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. For further information please visit EEA's website. Compared with the previous version, this version of includes: update to 'CDDA v14' and 'Natura 2000 End 2016', both published by the EEA in 2017; new fields have been added to CDDA, reporting the lowest possible level code of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS1, NUTS2 or NUTS3) in which the geographical entity is located, the percentage of the total area of marine ecosystems in the site, the major ecosystem type, additional notes about sites; new fields have beed added to Natura 2000 with area of site (ha), and the percentage of the site considered marine.