Open space preservation is an important spatial policy issue in developed, densely populated countries. Understanding open space dynamics in relation to urban development is critical to the development and evaluation of such policies. Starting from a conceptual model that hypotheses how open space will have developed over the past century we use a set of landscape ecology based indicators to capture these changes from a societal (perceptional) perspective. The indicators are applied to a newly compiled geodatabase of urban development in the Netherlands to show their performance in detecting and understanding past and future trends in open space provision.

The relevant spatial data files are provided here as a geodatabase in ESRI's .gdb format and as separate shapefiles (both as a zipped package including all files and as separate zipfiles for individual shapefiles). The shapefiles can be used in many GIS packages. The .mxd files can be used to add symbology to the data in various versions of ESRI's ArcGIS. The data uses the Dutch Rijksdriehoekstelsel_New (RD_New) projection system. The creation of the datasets and their origin is described in the related paper by Wagtendonk and Koomen (2019).

In addition to the spatial data sets provided here, an interactive webmapping service will be provided to allow users to view the data online.