Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (Points and Polygons) 2018 Update

Starting with the most recently updated polygon shapefile of ASPAs (Terauds and Lee 2016), which contained some minor improvement on the original ASPA spatial layer first made publicly available in 2011, we first cross-checked the location of ASPA polygons with the spatially explicit locations provided in the ASPAs Management Plans. Once polygons were aligned with the Management Plans, we then georeferenced the maps provided in the management plans to check the ASPA boundaries in relation to known landscape features, In some cases, there was a lack of concurrence between co-ordinates, PDF map, coastline, rock layer or Google Earth.

In these cases the following protocol was followed: snap to coordinates (unless clearly wrong), otherwise align to rock outcrop layer based on the PDF map, otherwise align to coastline. Full details of the updates made to each ASPA can be found in the README file accompanying the updated layer.