Protected Areas (Thailand)

Source: OpenStreetMap Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Thailand), terrestrial and marine Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: Yes — gates Sensitive areas

What it shows

This layer maps the network of protected areas across Thailand: national parks, forest parks, wildlife sanctuaries and non-hunting areas, together with a small number of nature reserves and other designations. These are the estate of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP) and the Royal Forest Department, and they mark where development is restricted and where nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk concentrates.

How it is built

Thailand's DNP does not publish protected-area boundaries openly — they are available on request only. Darwin therefore uses OpenStreetMap, the collaborative open geographic database, as the open source for this country, as it does for Côte d'Ivoire and Costa Rica. Areas are selected from the designation categories OpenStreetMap uses to tag protected land, national parks and nature reserves, restricted to Thailand, then assembled into a single national set of polygons.

Two groups are deliberately excluded. Historical parks are dropped: Thailand's are archaeological and cultural sites rather than protected nature. One cross-border area is dropped because it is Laotian, with the majority of its extent outside Thailand. The designation category is read from the English designation in each site's name, falling back to the OpenStreetMap protection class; the area in hectares is computed from the geometry, since OpenStreetMap carries no reported area. No score is computed — the layer is a presence-or-absence boundary set rather than a graded index.

How to read it

This is a boundary layer, so the relevant question is intersection: a site falling inside one of these polygons is flagged as overlapping a protected area. Overlap indicates potential exposure to conservation restrictions, permitting requirements and heightened stakeholder scrutiny. Sites outside the polygons carry no protected-area flag from this dataset.

Two properties of the layer are worth knowing when reading a result. First, a substantial share of the extent is marine: Thailand's marine national parks — Tarutao, Similan, Surin, Ang Thong and others — are mostly sea, and their polygons legitimately sit offshore rather than on land. Second, coverage is stronger on designation breadth than on total area. Compared with the global World Database on Protected Areas, this layer carries far more forest parks and non-hunting areas, but a smaller total protected extent, because the largest marine park polygons are incompletely mapped in OpenStreetMap. Neither source is a complete picture of Thailand; an absence of overlap is weaker evidence here than in countries where Darwin uses an official national register.

As elsewhere, designations overlap, so a national or regional total must be computed by unioning the geometry rather than by summing reported areas.

Class thresholds

This layer does not model a continuous physical quantity, so it has no numeric class thresholds. It is a presence / boundary mask: each polygon is the mapped extent of a designated protected area in Thailand, with no graded score attached. The attributes carried are categorical — site name, designation category (National Park, Forest Park, Wildlife Sanctuary, Non-Hunting Area, Nature Reserve and others) and governance sphere — plus an area in hectares computed from the geometry.

The "classes" are therefore binary: inside a protected-area polygon versus outside. A site is flagged on the Sensitive areas dimension when it intersects one of the polygons; the trigger is geometric overlap with the feature (an intersection test), not the crossing of any value threshold, and the configuration defines no proximity buffer distance.

How these thresholds were set. There are no thresholds to set — the layer is a presence mask assembled by Darwin from OpenStreetMap designations. Classification into protected versus not-protected comes from the OpenStreetMap tags and the designation recorded in each site's name; no Darwin-defined or externally published numeric cut-offs are involved.

Because OpenStreetMap carries no governance attribute, the governance sphere is assigned rather than sourced: national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, non-hunting areas and forest parks are recorded as national, since all are DNP or Royal Forest Department estate. The remainder are recorded as not reported.

Source

OpenStreetMap contributors, made available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Boundaries derived from the protected-area, national-park and nature-reserve designations recorded in the database.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This layer corresponds to WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter indicator S14_1 Protected/Conserved Areas. The WWF Risk Filter Suite uses the global World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA, UNEP-WCMC, accessed via IBAT). Darwin instead assembles a national dataset for Thailand from collaborative open mapping. The two are differently incomplete: Darwin's carries substantially more forest parks and non-hunting areas, while the WDPA carries a larger total protected extent thanks to more complete marine park boundaries.

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-protected-areas-thailand.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).