Biodiversity risk screening tool: legal outcomes per plot, not sensitivity scores
A biodiversity risk screening tool answers a question that every siting, sourcing and lending decision eventually raises: is this land in or near something protected, and whose land is it? Most tools answer with a sensitivity flag or a score. ERWAY Legality Assessment answers for each plot in the terms a permit officer or a lender actually uses — prohibited, restricted, verification needed — and shows the record that produced the answer.
The difference matters at scale. A sourcing team with three hundred supplier polygons, or a bank with a portfolio of collateral parcels, cannot commission a report per site. Upload the set, let five checks run per plot in the background, and read one outcome per plot with the strictest tier behind it. The five sources are named for what they are on the sources section of the product page; the banks and lenders page shows the portfolio case.
Screening in bulk, not one site per report
Every plot in a project is checked the same way against the same five sources: protected areas, Indigenous and community lands, World Heritage and biosphere sites, protected wetlands and threatened-species records. There is no per-site fee and no waiting for a report: the checks are queued on import and the dashboard shows which source has answered for how many plots. Until every available source has answered, the project shows 'Checks in progress' rather than an outcome.
An outcome in legal terms
A sensitivity flag tells you to look closer. An outcome tells you what the law allows on the plot, according to the record: a national park overlap is prohibited, a water-protection zone may need a permit, a documented Indigenous title needs the community's consent. The tier scale gives the strictness behind each outcome, and the export carries both. Threatened species are context, shown separately and never included in the outcome — the species screening page explains why.
Clearly labelled footprints
Heritage sites are published without boundaries, so each site is a circle computed from its published size with a confidence rating; a low-confidence circle can never make a plot prohibited. Protected wetland sites use the official boundary where one is published and a disc where only the centre point is. Every finding based on an approximate footprint is labelled as approximate. The product flags uncertainty rather than drawing a boundary it cannot support.
Where it stops
The screening is preliminary. It does not replace an environmental impact assessment, a critical-habitat assessment or a field survey, and it does not query a national cadastre. It tells you which plots need a document, a permit or a consent before you go further — which is the question that decides whether the expensive work is worth commissioning at all.