Protected areas

Though not really connected to the administrative subdivisions, I also keep following the changes in the protected areas - National Parks, Wildlife Sanctuaries and so on - when these are published in the Royal Gazette, and also created a XML schema to have the data on these in a machine readable format. In the last two weeks there were three announcements around these protected areas.

• Creation of Non-hunting area Khao Phu Luang (เขตห้ามล่าสัตว์ป่าเขาภูหลวง) in Nakhon Ratchasima [Gazette], covering 232 km² of the forested hills around Lam Phra Loeng reservoir.
• Remove of about 0.5 km² of Bakdai subdistrict out of the area of the Huai Thap Than - Huai Samran wildlife sanctuary (เขตรักษาพันธุ์สัตว์ป่าห้วยทับทัน-ห้วยสำราญ).
• Declaration of Khao Khao (เขตที่ดินโบราณสถานเขาขาว) as a historical monument, protecting rock pantings on three hills in Ao Luek district, Krabi.

Especially for the third one, I even had expanded the XSD to be able to be able to encode the fact that this historical monument covers three separate areas with five specifically marked locations.

And while I was at it, I finally also found an Excel sheet with all the protected areas managed by the Department of National Park, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, most interestingly showing the internal codes used for these parks. Each of the class of protected areas has a number range, and is named in order of the creation of the park - but even though there is this simple numbering schema, the actual codes have been reworked twice already. The number ranges are

• 1xxx for 127 National Parks (อุทยานแห่งชาติ)
• 2xxx for 58 Wildlife Sanctuaries (เขตรักษาพันธุ์สัตว์ป่า)
• 3xxx for 67 Non-hunting areas (เขตห้ามล่าสัตว์ป่า)
• 4xxx for 110 Forest Parks (วนอุทยาน)
• 9xxx for areas about to be protected - 20 National Parks, 2 Wildlife Sanctuaries and 3 Non-Hunting areas.

Dating from 2013, this sheet however does not include the above mentioned Khao Phu Luang Non-hunting area, though it seems none of the pending protected areas have been officially announced yet. Using that Excel sheet, I have now resumed work on the protected area XMLs, the one on the Forest Parks already has the complete list with creation date, area and the link to WikiData when available, only need to add the locations. However, the list which would be most useful for Wikipedia to support the annual "Wiki loves monuments" event is also the one which creates most work, as there are thousands of sites.