Open Data publishing is the default
The NPWS and Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage encourage the free dissemination of biodiversity data and aims to publish its data holdings into the future, where possible, as Open Data licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.
Publicly available datasets are available via the NPWS website at the following web page:
Summary discovery metadata for NPWS data projects are also published at the following public sector online data catalogues:
The re-use terms and required attribution will be defined in the full project metadata records embedded in the project data download. Please also read some important advisory notes on NPWS data usage and limitations here.
NPWS Data Available by Request
There are a number of NPWS datasets that are not available as Open Data. The key reasons are:
- the protection of the environment to which such information relates, such as the location of rare species – see our guidelines on access and usage of NPWS sensitive data;
- the Intellectual Property Rights or copyright of the data, or part thereof, belong to a third party that has not given permission for its re-use;
- there is personal data in the dataset and data protection restrictions apply;
- the dataset is unpublished as it is still in draft form.
If you have queries related to datasets listed above, please contact NPWS directly.
If you wish to submit Freedom of Information (FOI), Access to Information on the Environment (AIE) or Subject Access Requests (SAR) please follow instructions on our Sensitive Data Access webpage.