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marineregions.org/

Marine Regions maritime boundaries (EEZ)

FreeTerms restrict useauth: none for OGC/SOAP/REST services; free registration form for downloadsCC-BY-4.0#osint#maritime#boundaries#eez#gis#research-use✓ verified Nov 5, 2026

⚠️ Research and educational use only, not navigational or commercial use

Marine Regions' disclaimer page says:

“Marine Regions is not meant to be used for legal, economical (in the sense of exploration of natural resources) or navigational purposes. It is developed solely for scientific, educational and research purposes.”
“We kindly request our users not to make our products available for download elsewhere and to always refer to marineregions.org for the most up-to-date products and services.”

Source: Marine Regions license, terms of use & citation (checked Nov 5, 2026). This isn't legal advice.

For other maritime boundary and spatial reference data, see:

Each source has its own terms; read its licence note before you use it.

Marine Regions maritime boundaries (EEZ)

Marine Regions (VLIZ, Flanders Marine Institute) publishes global maritime boundary datasets for download and through OGC services and a SOAP/REST API, including World EEZ v12 (2023-10-25), World 24 NM Contiguous Zone v4, World 12 NM Territorial Seas v4, Internal Waters v4, Archipelagic Waters v4, World High Seas v2 (2024-10-10) and Extended Continental Shelves v2, in GeoPackage, Shapefile and KML formats.

Required Attribution:

Flanders Marine Institute (2026): MarineRegions.org.

Coverage

Global maritime boundaries as versioned static releases (e.g. EEZ v12, 2023-10-25); no live updates between releases.

Verdict

This is a reference layer for which EEZ or territorial sea a vessel position falls in, context for fishing-incursion, sanctions-zone and dark-activity analysis next to AIS tracking sources. The World EEZ v12 download form states, "This dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License," but the disclaimer says the project "is not meant to be used for legal, economical (in the sense of exploration of natural resources) or navigational purposes" and is developed "solely for scientific, educational and research purposes"; Signal Lab links to the official downloads and asks users to cite VLIZ rather than re-host the files.

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Use in your agent

Query the Marine Regions EEZ boundaries WFS into geopandas. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 5, 2026.

Raw skill file (/skills/marine-regions-maritime-boundaries.md)Also in our MCP server: call get_ingestion_skill with {"slug": "marine-regions-maritime-boundaries"}.

Access

  • No account or key for the public WFS/OGC web services.
  • Cite Flanders Marine Institute (2026): MarineRegions.org and do not re-host the downloads elsewhere, per the licence page.

Request

bash
curl -sL 'https://geo.vliz.be/geoserver/MarineRegions/wfs?service=WFS&version=1.0.0&request=GetFeature&typeName=eez_boundaries&maxFeatures=5&outputformat=application/json'

Format

GeoJSON FeatureCollection of EEZ boundary line features (line_id, line_name, line_type, mrgid_sov1, territory1, sovereign1 and related fields).

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

python
"""Marine Regions EEZ boundaries: WFS GetFeature (GeoJSON) -> geopandas -> Parquet. No key; CC-BY-4.0, cite VLIZ."""
import requests
import pandas as pd
import geopandas as gpd

URL = "https://geo.vliz.be/geoserver/MarineRegions/wfs"
params = {"service": "WFS", "version": "1.0.0", "request": "GetFeature", "typeName": "eez_boundaries", "maxFeatures": 5, "outputformat": "application/json"}
r = requests.get(URL, params=params, timeout=60)
r.raise_for_status()
gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(r.json()["features"])
gdf.to_parquet("marineregions_eez_boundaries_sample.parquet")
print(len(gdf), "features;", list(gdf.columns[:5]))

Run by us on 2026-11-05 (python 3 | requests | geopandas | pyarrow). Result: WFS GetFeature returned a 5-feature GeoJSON FeatureCollection for typeName=eez_boundaries on 2026-11-05.

Limits

  • This entry covers the versioned EEZ boundary layer; other layers (12 NM, 24 NM, High Seas, Extended Continental Shelves) use different typeName values.
  • Marine Regions asks users to always refer to marineregions.org rather than mirror the downloads elsewhere.

Quirks

  • The WFS endpoint lives on geo.vliz.be, a different host from marineregions.org.
  • maxFeatures caps the response; omit it for the full layer (large for World EEZ v12).

Terms and attribution

  • "Marine Regions is not meant to be used for legal, economical (in the sense of exploration of natural resources) or navigational purposes. It is developed solely for scientific, educational and research purposes."
  • "This dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License."

Sources

Information and education only. Not financial, investment, legal or tax advice. Listings can be inaccurate, incomplete or out of date and are provided "as is". Free tiers, limits and licenses belong to each provider and can change, so check the provider's own terms before you rely on them. Terms & Disclaimer

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