This is particularly noticeable for marine protected areas, where some countries have designated relatively large amounts of their marine territory as protected areas, while others are yet to establish substantive marine protected area networks. In the terrestrial sphere, protected area networks are much more developed but management objectives vary greatly, with some countries predominantly using mixed-use ‘protected landscape’ type of designations, and others using protected areas primarily for the conservation of more pristine ecosystems. Data refer to metropolitan or mainland countries, overseas territories are not included. It is a geospatial database where each record is a protected area with its geometry stored either as polygons representing the area boundaries or as a point (where explicit boundary data is not available).