We acknowledge partial funding from the EU Grant Agreement 869300 – (FutureMares project) and EU GA 101059407 (MarinePlan project). Further, we also would like to acknowledge institutional support by the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S). María D. Castro-Cadenas acknowledges the FPU grant of the Spanish Ministry of Universities (reference FPU20/04852). Valerio Sbragaglia is supported by a “Ramón y Cajal” research fellowships (RYC2021-033065-I) granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation

Zoning schemes of the MPAs were created by building on a preliminary version created in collaboration with the International Forum for Sustainable Underwater Activities (IFSUA) using available maps and coordinates from legal texts and management plans as of May 2023.-- Description of methods used for collection/generation of data: The methods are described in Castro-Cadenas et al., 2025

Marine protected areas (MPA) zoning and level of protection from fishing obtained from the publication "Fishing activities within Spanish marine protected areas in the Mediterranean Sea ". It contains MPA zoning, surface and level of protection for the target MPAs. Data is provided as a shapefile

Peer reviewed