Biodiversity Reservoir

Source: SRCE — Trame verte et bleue (France) Year: 2013-2015 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Critical areas · SRCE (France) Coverage: Region (France) Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer delineates biodiversity reservoirs identified within France's regional ecological-network planning. Biodiversity reservoirs are core areas where biodiversity is rich and well represented and where species can complete all or part of their life cycle. They are a central building block of the Green and Blue Network, France's framework for maintaining and strengthening the functionality of natural environments within planning and development.

How it is built

The Green and Blue Network (Trame Verte et Bleue) is a biodiversity-preservation tool that embeds the need to maintain functional natural environments into planning instruments and development projects (Allag-Dhuisme et al., 2010). It is defined at regional level through the Regional Schemes of Ecological Coherence (SRCE). The ecological continuities it identifies comprise biodiversity reservoirs together with ecological corridors; this layer maps the reservoir component as boundary areas.

How to read it

This is a boundary layer. A site that falls within, intersects or lies near a biodiversity-reservoir polygon is flagged as overlapping a recognised core biodiversity area, indicating heightened ecological sensitivity and a likely need for closer assessment under regional planning rules.

Class thresholds

This layer is a categorical / presence (boundary) mask, not a continuous physical quantity. It delineates biodiversity-reservoir polygons designated in France's Regional Schemes of Ecological Coherence (SRCE / Trame Verte et Bleue). There is therefore no measured flux and no numeric class breaks — the polygons carry descriptive attributes (reservoir ID, name, dominant habitat type) rather than a value that is binned into risk classes.

The "classes" are simply presence versus proximity: a site either overlaps (or lies near) a designated reservoir, or it does not. The trigger is overlap with, or proximity to, a reservoir polygon. This layer is contextual and is not used in materiality scoring, so it does not flag a risk dimension on its own.

How these thresholds were set. Boundaries are set by the relevant French region's SRCE designation under the Trame Verte et Bleue framework (Allag-Dhuisme et al., 2010); they are administrative ecological-network boundaries, not Darwin-derived thresholds. Darwin reproduces the official polygons without applying any numeric classification.

Source

Regional Schemes of Ecological Coherence (SRCE), France — Trame Verte et Bleue (trameverteetbleue.fr); Allag-Dhuisme et al. (2010).

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

There is no equivalent indicator in the WWF Risk Filter Suite. This is a regional French dataset that loosely supports ecological-connectivity screening (WWF indicator S14_5), but WWF's connectivity input is a global functional-connectivity surface that Darwin does not hold globally, so there is no direct WWF counterpart.

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-biodiversity-reservoir.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).