Protected Areas (Mexico)

Source: CONANP Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Mexico), terrestrial and marine Format: Boundary polygons (federal) Used in risk analysis: Yes — gates Sensitive areas

What it shows

This layer maps Mexico's federal protected natural areas (Áreas Naturales Protegidas federales), the estate administered by the Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas (CONANP). It covers the full range of federal management categories:

• Biosphere reserves (Reservas de la Biosfera) — the largest category by area, combining strictly protected core zones with buffer zones permitting regulated use.
• National parks (Parques Nacionales).
• Flora and fauna protection areas (Áreas de Protección de Flora y Fauna).
• Natural resources protection areas (Áreas de Protección de Recursos Naturales).
• Natural monuments (Monumentos Naturales) and sanctuaries (Santuarios).

These designations mark where development is restricted and where nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk concentrates.

How it is built

The boundaries come directly from CONANP, published through Mexico's national open-data portal. Darwin takes the federal decree boundaries as issued, reprojects from the source Mexican ITRF2008 reference frame to WGS84, and expands CONANP's management-category codes into full English names. Each polygon carries its site name, designation category, governance sphere and reported area.

No score is computed — the layer is a presence-or-absence boundary set rather than a graded index. The governance sphere is uniformly Federal, since this is a single-tier federal dataset.

Coverage: federal tier only

This layer covers the federal tier only, which is 95.9% of Mexico's mapped protected area. Three tiers of protected area exist in Mexico, and CONANP publishes open boundaries for just the first:

The two missing tiers contribute 4.18 Mha of unique area beyond the federal boundaries. They are excluded because no openly licensed boundary set exists for them: CONANP's voluntary-conservation register is published as a table without geometry, and state-level areas fall outside CONANP's remit entirely.

In practice this means a site overlapping a federal protected area is reliably flagged, while a site inside a small state reserve or a voluntarily certified private property may not be. Given the area distribution, the vast majority of Mexico's protected estate is captured.

Ramsar wetlands (~144 sites in Mexico) are also absent by design. Ramsar is a separate international instrument rather than a Mexican decree, and those sites are covered by Darwin's dedicated Ramsar layer.

How to read it

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

The designation category qualifies what an overlap means. A national park and a biosphere reserve both flag, but imply different regimes — biosphere reserves in particular are zoned, with core areas far more restrictive than their buffer zones, a distinction the boundary alone does not express.

As elsewhere, designations overlap one another, so a national or regional total must be computed by unioning the geometry rather than by summing reported areas.

Class thresholds

This layer does not model a continuous physical quantity, so it has no numeric class thresholds. It is a presence / boundary mask: each polygon is the mapped extent of a decreed federal protected area, with no graded score attached. The attributes carried are categorical — site name, designation category, governance sphere — plus a reported area in hectares that describes the feature rather than scoring it.

The "classes" are therefore binary: inside a protected-area polygon versus outside. A site is flagged on the Sensitive areas dimension when it intersects one of the polygons; the trigger is geometric overlap with the feature (an intersection test), not the crossing of any value threshold, and the configuration defines no proximity buffer distance.

How these thresholds were set. There are no thresholds to set — class membership is the official designation carried by each feature, taken verbatim from CONANP's decrees. Darwin reproduces those official statuses as-is; no Darwin classification and no external numeric methodology is applied.

Source

CONANP (Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas), published via Mexico's national open-data portal under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

An earlier build of this layer used CONABIO's redistribution of the same federal data alongside the state and voluntary tiers. That redistribution is licensed CC BY-NC (non-commercial), so the layer was rebuilt from CONANP's own open publication. The federal geometry is the same data: the two agree on 100.00% of extent across identical site names, differing by 0.001% attributable to datum precision, and CONANP's cut is the more recent of the two.

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 takes Mexico's federal register at source, which gives current decree boundaries directly from the administering agency rather than a global compilation, at the cost of the sub-federal tiers the WDPA sometimes records.

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