WDPA quickstart — protected-area polygons for a country¶

Fetch a country's protected areas from Protected Planet (WDPA) through the EarthLens facade, then map the polygons.

WDPA is the cluster's polygon backend: download() returns a FeatureCollection of Polygon / MultiPolygon geometries in EPSG:4326, fetched from the Protected Planet v4 REST API.

Token. Protected Planet v4 needs a personal token (request one at https://api.protectedplanet.net/request). Set it as the WDPA_TOKEN environment variable. The backend uses core requests — there is no SDK extra to install.

Setup¶

Import matplotlib for the map and the EarthLens entry point. The WDPA_TOKEN environment variable supplies the credential.

In [ ]:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from earthlens import EarthLens

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from earthlens import EarthLens

Request parameters¶

variables=["KEN"] selects Kenya by ISO3 code; you can also pass a friendly name ("Kenya"), a "country:KEN" selector, or a numeric WDPA id. WDPA is not time-filtered, so the dates only frame the request.

In [ ]:

country = ["KEN"]
start, end = "2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"

country = ["KEN"] start, end = "2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"

Download¶

Reads WDPA_TOKEN from the environment. One call returns the protected-area polygons and writes a GeoParquet under path.

In [ ]:

fc = EarthLens(
    data_source="wdpa",
    variables=country,
    start=start,
    end=end,
    lat_lim=[-90.0, 90.0],
    lon_lim=[-180.0, 180.0],
    path="out/wdpa",
).download()

print(f"{len(fc)} protected areas")
fc[["name", "designation", "iucn_category"]].head()

fc = EarthLens( data_source="wdpa", variables=country, start=start, end=end, lat_lim=[-90.0, 90.0], lon_lim=[-180.0, 180.0], path="out/wdpa", ).download() print(f"{len(fc)} protected areas") fc[["name", "designation", "iucn_category"]].head()

Map the protected areas¶

In [ ]:

ax = fc.plot(facecolor="forestgreen", edgecolor="black", alpha=0.5)
ax.set_title("WDPA protected areas — Kenya")
ax.set_xlabel("longitude")
ax.set_ylabel("latitude")
plt.show()

ax = fc.plot(facecolor="forestgreen", edgecolor="black", alpha=0.5) ax.set_title("WDPA protected areas — Kenya") ax.set_xlabel("longitude") ax.set_ylabel("latitude") plt.show()

Licensing¶

WDPA carries a custom UNEP-WCMC license (not Creative Commons): commercial use needs written permission and redistribution is restricted, so every download raises a LicenseWarning. Cite the database as the Protected Planet terms require.