Protected Areas Data: Afghanistan

Photo Credits to Omar Wazir on Flickr

In September 2022, I wrote a post about creating an openly-licensed dataset of protected areas around the globe. Yes, datasets already exist, but no, none are available without restrictions and on a global scale.

I’ve spent time collecting source information, digitizing features, formatting properties, and forgetting to save several QGIS documents since that time. I’ve also hesitated on how to go about even releasing data.

This morning, I decided to wrap up the work on a single country – Afghanistan – and post the dataset on GitHub. I also created a schema, properties, and source README files that I should be able to reproduce for future country uploads.

Will I change the schema and data format before the next country I upload is complete? Probably. Is this dataset complete? No. But I figure it’s best to upload these datasets in batches and post about them every so often until I’ve uploaded data for each country on the globe. Then I can consider the next steps.

Take a look at the data and open issues here:

https://github.com/stepps00/Protected-Areas-Data-Afghanistan