This data set represents the regions for level 1, 2 and 3 of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) for 2013. The NUTS nomenclature is a hierarchical classification of statistical regions and subdivides the EU economic territory into regions of three different levels (NUTS 1, 2 and 3, respectively, moving from larger to smaller territorial units). NUTS 1 is the most aggregated level. The NUTS classification has been officially established through Regulation (EC) No 1059/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council and amendments. A non official NUTS-like classification has been defined for the EFTA countries and candidate countries. An introduction to the NUTS classification is available here: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/nuts_nomenclature/introduction This data set has been created mainly from the EuroBoundary Map v 8.x(Eurogeographics), geographic information from TurkStat for Turkey, the Global Administrative Unit Layer from FAO (UN) for Macedonia and a list of communes per statistical region provided by the countries. Available scales are 1M, 3M, 10M, 20M, 60M). Here six scale ranges (100K, 1M, 3M, 10M and 20M, 60M) are available. Coverage is the economical territory of the EU, EFTA countries and candidate countries as in 2013. This data has been generalised from 100K scale and therfore may not be an accurate depiction of the NUTS regions.

Study area of SIMCelt Project, composed of OSPAR zone 3 with an extension to Western Channel