Ecosystem Integrity Index (EII)
The Ecosystem Integrity Index is a single, holistic measure of how healthy and intact terrestrial ecosystems are across the world.
Source: Ecosystem Integrity Index v1 (The Landbanking Group) Year: 2025 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · High integrity areas Coverage: Global Format: Raster grid (~300 m) Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)
What it shows
The Ecosystem Integrity Index is a single, holistic measure of how healthy and intact terrestrial ecosystems are across the world. It helps identify where ecosystems remain in good condition — and so are sensitive to disturbance — and where they are already degraded, which is central to assessing nature-related risk and dependency.
How it is built
The index is produced by The Landbanking Group (Leutner, 2025). It combines three dimensions of ecosystem health into one score: functional integrity (how productive the ecosystem is), structural integrity (the structure and connectivity of habitat) and compositional integrity (the make-up of the species present). These dimensions are integrated to give a continuous score from 0 (fully degraded) to 1 (fully intact), mapped globally on a fine grid of roughly 300 metres.
How to read it
Scores run from 0 to 1. Values close to 1 indicate intact, well-functioning ecosystems that warrant careful treatment; values close to 0 indicate heavily degraded ecosystems. A high score therefore flags a high-integrity, sensitive area near or at a site.
Class thresholds
The underlying quantity is a dimensionless index, 0–1 (shown as 0–100%): the Ecosystem Integrity Index (EII), which combines functional, structural and compositional integrity into a single ecosystem-health score (0 = fully degraded, 1 = fully intact). It is an index, not a physical flux. The legend bins the continuous score into the following classes:
| Integrity (EII) | |
|---|---|
| = 0% | Fully degraded |
| 0 – 10% | |
| 10 – 20% | |
| 20 – 30% | |
| 30 – 40% | |
| 40 – 50% | |
| 50 – 60% | |
| 60 – 70% | |
| 70 – 80% | |
| 80 – 90% | |
| 90 – 95% | |
| 95 – 100% | Fully intact |
The proximity rule flags the Sensitive areas dimension when the layer value is above 70% (EII ≥ 0.7) — i.e. it reaches the high-integrity classes (template: "Proximity with high ecosystem integrity area (EII index)"). This layer is contextual and is not currently used in materiality scoring.
How these thresholds were set. This is a Darwin in-house classification of The Landbanking Group's EII v1 surface: fixed round-number percentage bins (0, 10, 20 … 90, 95, 100), with the two extremes split out, chosen for visualisation rather than taken from a published EII threshold standard. The 0.7 high-integrity flag is a Darwin choice.
Source
The Landbanking Group — Ecosystem Integrity Index v1; Leutner, B. (2025). https://github.com/landler-io/ecosystem-integrity-index.
Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite
This relates to WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter indicators S2_4 Ecosystem Condition (degraded) and S14_5 Ecosystem Condition (intact). WWF's ecosystem-condition indicator is a composite that pairs the EII with global functional connectivity, river fragmentation and a marine habitat measure. Darwin uses the EII on its own, so global functional connectivity, river fragmentation and marine habitat condition are not captured here.
Legend
Symbolised field: Integrity index
| Value (Integrity index) | Label | Colour |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | = 0% | #3d000f |
| 0.1 | ≤ 10% | #5c0217 |
| 0.3 | ≤ 20% | #a50026 |
| 0.4 | ≤ 30% | #d73027 |
| 0.5 | ≤ 40% | #f46d43 |
| 0.6 | ≤ 50% | #fdae61 |
| 0.7 | ≤ 60% | #fee08b |
| 0.8 | ≤ 70% | #d9ef8b |
| 0.9 | ≤ 80% | #a6d96a |
| 0.95 | ≤ 90% | #66bd63 |
| 1 | ≤ 95% | #1a9850 |
| ≤ 100% | #006837 |
Generated from darwin/layers/layer-ecosystem-integrity-index-eii.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).