Protected Areas (Costa Rica)

Source: OpenStreetMap Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Costa Rica) Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer maps the network of legally protected areas across Costa Rica, including national parks, wildlife refuges, biological reserves, protected zones and nature reserves. Protected areas signal places where development is restricted and where nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk is concentrated, making them an important screening input for any site or supply-chain footprint in the country.

How it is built

The boundaries are drawn from OpenStreetMap, a collaborative open geographic database. Areas are selected from the relevant designation categories used in OpenStreetMap to tag protected land, national parks and nature reserves, then assembled into a single set of national-level polygons. Each polygon represents the mapped extent of a designated site. No score is computed; the layer is a presence-or-absence boundary set rather than a graded index.

How to read it

This is a boundary layer, so the relevant question is intersection: a site that falls inside, or close to, one of these polygons is flagged as overlapping a protected area. Overlap indicates potential exposure to conservation restrictions, permitting requirements and heightened stakeholder scrutiny. Areas outside the polygons carry no protected-area flag from this dataset.

Class thresholds

This is not a continuous physical-flux layer and it has no numeric class breaks. It is a categorical presence / boundary layer: each polygon is the mapped extent of a legally designated protected area in Costa Rica (national park, wildlife refuge, biological reserve, protected zone or nature reserve), tagged in OpenStreetMap under boundary=national_park, boundary=protected_area and leisure=nature_reserve. There is no underlying quantity, score or unit — a location is either inside a protected-area polygon or it is not.

Accordingly there are only two states rather than graded risk classes:

The trigger is a pure intersection on the Sensitive areas dimension: a site is flagged when its footprint overlaps one of the 271 protected-area polygons. The layer configuration defines no proximity buffer distance, so the flag is geometric overlap only, with no surrounding metre-based buffer.

How these thresholds were set. There is no threshold to set: the layer carries no measured quantity to classify. The "classes" are simply presence versus absence of a designated boundary. The polygon set is assembled in Darwin in-house processing from the relevant OpenStreetMap protected-area, national-park and nature-reserve designations; it does not impose any numeric cut-off of its own.

Source

OpenStreetMap contributors, made available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Boundaries derived from the protected-area, national-park and nature-reserve designations recorded in the database.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This layer corresponds to WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter indicator S14_1 Protected/Conserved Areas. The WWF Risk Filter Suite uses the global World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA, UNEP-WCMC, accessed via IBAT). Darwin instead assembles a national dataset for Costa Rica, which can extend or localise coverage relative to the global WDPA but is sourced from collaborative open mapping rather than the official protected-area register.

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-protected-areas-costa-rica.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).