The Common Database on Designated Areas (CDDA) was created in 2014 by Cogea for the European Marine Observation and Data Network. It is entirely based on GIS Data from the European Environmental Agency's (EEA), plus external links and selected EEA tabular data joined by Cogea to the feature attributes, as well as a calculation by Cogea of marine and coastal location of features.The CDDA is commonly known as 'Nationally designated areas'. The inventory began in 1995 under the CORINE programme of the European Commission. It is now one of the agreed Eionet priority data flows maintained by the EEA with support from the European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity. It is the result of an annual data flow through Eionet countries. The EEA publishes the dataset and makes it available to the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA). CDDA data can also be queried online in the European Nature Information System (EUNIS).The whole dataset is available for download on the EMODnet Human Activities portal. In the webmap the EEA dataset has been filtered by Cogea to show only (i) marine areas, i.e. areas with a marine percentage higher than 0 and/or a marine "ecotype" (as calculated or reported by the EEA) and (ii) areas that, even if not identified as marine by the EEA, intersect the coastline or that are within a distance of 1 km from the coastline. In both cases the coast_mar field value=1. The EEA coastline dataset is available at https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/eea-coastline-for-analysis-2. Geographical coverage of GIS vector boundary data is: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo under UNSC Resolution 1244/99, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. EEA does not have permission to distribute some or all sites reported by Estonia, Finland, Ireland and Turkey. Compared with the previous release, this one includes the updated dataset 'CDDA_2019_v01', published by the EEA in June 2019. For further information please visit the EEA's website.