The county administrative boards and municipalities can form nature reserves according to the Environmental Code. Nature reserves are formed to “preserve biodiversity, nurture and preserve valuable natural environments or meet the needs of outdoor recreation areas. An area needed to protect, restore or create valuable natural habitats or habitat for protected species may also be declared as a nature reserve. ”(From the Environmental Code). Sweden has more than 3,300 nature reserves.This data set originally comes from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency ( Naturvårdsverket). We have filtered the original data so that only data from Västerbotten county is shown.Descriptions for the different columns may be missing if there was none  linked to the data set when we imported it. If you have any questions about protected areas, contact the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.