Landscape designation and nature designation get conflated constantly, and they protect different things under different law. The green space and protected landscape map holds the landscape half.

The named landscapes

13 National Parks and 40 National Landscapes — the designation formerly called Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Both protect scenic and cultural character rather than habitat, which is why their boundaries so often fail to match the SSSIs inside them.

Scotland's 42 wild land areas are a different instrument again: not a statutory designation but a mapped assessment of where wildness is least compromised, and material in Scottish planning decisions.

Access, which is not the same as ownership

16,226 parcels of registered common land, 26,536 parcels of CRoW conclusive open country, and the dedicated and registered access land alongside them.

Common land is the one most often misread. It is privately owned land over which others hold rights — not public land, and not necessarily land anyone may walk on. The access layers say where a right of access exists; the common land layer says where historic rights exist. They are frequently different places.

Framing

159 National Character Areas divide England into landscapes that share a common character, and 48 Local Nature Recovery Strategy areas set the framework nature recovery is now planned through. Neither constrains anything directly; both decide how a proposal will be argued about.

Sources

Natural England, NatureScot, Natural Resources Wales, the Environment Agency (registered common land) and OS Open Greenspace, under the Open Government Licence v3.