Forestry and plantation site screening: concessions checked against protected areas and community lands
A forest concession or a plantation block is a polygon with a history: a protected area at one edge, a customary claim across the middle, a Biosphere Reserve's transition zone over the whole. Certification schemes ask for a high conservation value assessment; the EUDR asks whether wood, rubber, palm oil, cocoa or coffee was produced in accordance with the relevant legislation of the country, including its protected-area and Indigenous-rights rules; lenders ask both. ERWAY Legality Assessment gives each polygon one outcome from records before any of that work is commissioned.
Concessions, compartments, plantation blocks and supplier areas come in as GeoJSON with the concession or block code as identity. Each is checked against international protected-area records with their protection class, land-tenure records for Indigenous Peoples and local communities, heritage and wetland designations and threatened-species records. A strict-protection overlap is tier 1, prohibited; a sustainable-use or forestry designation is tier 3 or 6 with its reason; a recognised Indigenous territory carries the consent flag and is counted. The Indigenous-land screening page details the tenure logic; the EUDR Article 3(b) page covers the due diligence use.
Before the HCV assessment
A high conservation value assessment is field work and judgement; it is not where the desktop question should be answered. The screening tells the forest manager which compartments overlap a protected area and by how many hectares, which sit on community land and under what tenure, and which are near a wetland of international importance — the list the HCV team starts from, with the map and the geometry attached. The protected-area screening page shows the overlap logic.
Forestry designations and weak signals
Forestry designations in the records are tier 6, informational: a forest reserve is a record, not necessarily a restriction on management. The product shows it, says it is informational, and does not let it decide the outcome. The same goes for the vicinity bands of heritage sites and the far bands of protected wetlands. What decides is a strict-protection class, an official wetland boundary, a documented title.
What remains
The forest management plan, the HCV assessment, the certification audit and, for EUDR commodities, the risk assessment and the due diligence statement. The screening is preliminary against international records and is labelled as such; where the country's own forest register or cadastre is the authority, the page tells you to consult it.