Functional Ecological Network (FEN, Belgium, Antwerp)

Source: Antwerp Region (Functional Ecological Network) Year: 2020 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Critical areas Coverage: Region (Antwerp, Belgium) Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer maps "search zones" — areas of the Antwerp landscape with the greatest potential to act as connections between important natural cores. Together these zones form the Functional Ecological Network. It matters for nature-related risk because activity placed in or near these connective zones can fragment habitats and weaken the ability of species to move across the landscape.

How it is built

The network was identified by the Antwerp Region authorities. Beyond a general landscape connection, the dataset also defines search zones tailored to four groups of species with similar ecological needs (so-called ecoprofile groups): forest types; structured grasslands with small landscape features; species of heathland, dunes and dry grasslands; and species of swamps and wet rough vegetation. Each zone represents land that, if maintained or restored, would help link existing natural cores into a coherent connective network. The layer is delivered as mapped sub-national polygons.

How to read it

This is a boundary layer. A site that falls inside, or close to, one of the search-zone polygons should be flagged as potentially relevant to ecological connectivity. Where a site intersects a species-group zone, the connectivity concern is specific to that ecoprofile group (for example, forest or heathland species).

Class thresholds

This layer does not model a continuous physical quantity, so it has no numeric class thresholds. It is a presence / boundary layer: a set of 408 mapped "Natural Core" / search-zone polygons (the Functional Ecological Network). The only meaningful "class" is presence versus absence — whether a site overlaps one of the search-zone polygons.

The trigger is a spatial intersection with a search-zone polygon: a site is flagged on the Sensitive areas dimension when it falls inside one of the Functional Ecological Network polygons (the layer carries no proximity buffer distance, so the test is direct overlap rather than a distance band). The popup identifies the specific polygon by its core number (Nummer, 1–408).

How these thresholds were set. Not applicable — there are no thresholds to set. The geometry is taken directly from the source dataset (the polygons themselves define the network), so the classification is simply the presence of the mapped feature. The search zones were delineated by the Antwerp Region authorities as part of their Functional Ecological Network mapping, not by any continuous-quantity binning rule.

Source

Antwerp Region — Functional Ecological Network search zones.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

There is no direct equivalent in the WWF Risk Filter Suite. This is a regional dataset that loosely supports ecological-connectivity screening (in the spirit of WWF's ecosystem-condition theme), but WWF's global connectivity input is the worldwide functional-connectivity surface (Brennan, 2022), which is not the same data. Darwin does not yet hold that global surface, so this Antwerp network is a localised extension rather than a WWF indicator.

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-functional-ecological-network-fen-belgium-antwerp.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).