Protected Islands and Shoals, From an Orkney Seabird Isle to the Bonin Islands

Eynhallow is an uninhabited island of 75 hectares in Orkney, and the article records that Historic Scotland maintains the site. Its last crofters were cleared away in 1851, and today it works as a bird sanctuary visited mainly on organized trips.

The Isle of Muck is a tiny island off Islandmagee in County Antrim that is closed to the public. Ulster Wildlife has managed it as a seabird sanctuary for at least 25 years, and a restoration project begun in 2017 to remove invasive brown rats allowed puffins to be reintroduced in 2024.

Hoburg Shoal is not an island but a shallow bank of the Baltic Sea south of Gotland, with water 15 to 40 metres deep. It is protected as a bird reserve of about 1,226 square kilometres and is a Special Protection Area in the Natura 2000 network.

The National Marine Park of Alonnisos Northern Sporades was founded by presidential decree on 16 May 1992 as the first marine park in Greece. It covers about 2,260 square kilometres of the northern Aegean, including Alonnisos itself, six smaller islands and 22 uninhabited islets.

The Island of Principe Biosphere Reserve, established in 2012 in Sao Tome and Principe, includes the entire emerged area of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea. Its 71,593 hectares are divided into core, buffer and transition zones on land and at sea.

San Lucas Island in the Gulf of Nicoya was designated a national park in August 2020 by decree 9892, the thirtieth in Costa Rica. From 1873 to 1991 it held a penal facility, whose ruins are preserved as heritage structures.

Takutea is an uninhabited sand island in the Cook Islands, about 21 kilometres northwest of Atiu. In 1950 the Land Court appointed three ariki and four mataiapo as trustees to hold it for the people of Atiu, so its protection rests on community ownership.

Sipadan is the only oceanic island in Malaysia, rising about 600 metres from the seabed in the Celebes Sea. It was declared a bird sanctuary in 1933 and re-gazetted in 1963, and it sits within Sipadan Island Park, a marine park of 16,860 hectares managed by Sabah Parks.

Ogasawara National Park protects the Bonin Islands roughly 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo and was designated in 1972. The islands were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011, and the critically endangered Bonin flying fox is their only native mammal.