WWF G200 Marine

Source: WWF Global 200 Year: 2002 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Critical areas · WWF G200 Coverage: Global Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer delineates the marine ecoregions identified by WWF's Global 200 project as outstanding examples of the world's marine biodiversity. These are priority seascapes whose habitats and species are considered essential to conserve a representative sample of life on Earth. A site that falls within or close to one of these areas sits in a recognised conservation priority, which can raise reputational and regulatory sensitivity for operations and supply chains.

How it is built

The Global 200 was developed by WWF as a science-based ranking of the planet's most biologically distinctive ecoregions, grouped into terrestrial, freshwater and marine sets. The marine set captures the seascapes selected for their species richness, endemism, distinct evolutionary or ecological phenomena, and rarity of habitat type. This layer presents those marine priority ecoregions as fixed boundary polygons; it is a designation map rather than a graded risk surface.

How to read it

This is a presence layer. A site that intersects or lies near one of the Global 200 marine polygons is flagged as falling within a globally significant marine conservation priority. There is no 1–5 score; the relevant signal is simply whether a location coincides with a designated ecoregion.

Class thresholds

This is not a continuous physical-flux layer and has no numeric thresholds. It is a presence / boundary mask: the underlying feature is the set of marine priority ecoregions from WWF's Global 200 analysis, stored as vector polygons. The symbolised field (Main Habitat Type Number) is a purely descriptive habitat code — Polar, Temperate shelf and sea, Coastal temperate upwelling, Coastal tropical upwelling, Coastal tropical coral — not a graded risk score. For any location there are only two relevant states: inside (or near) a Global 200 marine ecoregion, or outside it.

The single "class" is presence; the habitat-type numbers only colour the polygons. This is a contextual layer and is not used in materiality scoring (the TOML defines no proximity trigger), so no buffer distance is configured; relevance is determined purely by spatial overlap or proximity to a designated ecoregion.

How these thresholds were set. There is no Darwin classification of a continuous quantity here: membership and habitat typing are taken verbatim from WWF's Global 200 marine priority ecoregions (Olson, 2012). No breaks, bins or cut-offs are applied by Darwin.

Reference: WWF Global 200 ecoregions (Olson, 2012).

Source

WWF Global 200 (marine priority ecoregions). See WWF's Global 200 publication.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This layer maps to BRF indicator S14_4 Other Important Delineated Areas (Global 200 ecoregions, Olson 2012). It is drawn from the same source family that WWF itself uses, so the alignment is direct.

Legend

Symbolised field: Main Habitat Type Number

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-wwf-g200-marine.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).