Preface

Abstract

 Increasing number of plant and animal species on the globe are becoming threatened to be extinct under high pressures of today's highly industrialized human life exhausting earth's biotic resources. Simultaneously, healthy ecosystems having provided us with a great variety of goods and services are rapidly declining. Exploring for sound ways for teaming with biotic communities is pressingly needed for the sustainability of both human and all other living things on the globe.

 The 'SATOYAMA', the traditional rural landscape common in pre-industrialized Japan, is deemed to provide valuable suggestions in finding keys to the solution for us. 'SATOYAMA' in Japanese means land for exploiting plant resources utilized for traditional agricultural and village life. Environmental patchiness is the most conspicuous feature of the system that is a mosaic of land uses, including various types of forests, grasslands, farms, ponds, and creeks, which individually or in some combined manner may provide high-quality habitats for a large number of wild animals and plants. Human interventions related to resource exploitation in the forests and grasslands, which are less or least exploitative, could enhance or maintain local biodiversity through exerting intermediate disturbances promoting species coexistence. Therefore, well-managed 'SATOYAMA' systems were highly sustainable and characterized by high biodiversity as well as Asian beauty of nature.

 Despite of intense industrialization, modernization or Westernization having started in date of the rise of Japan's industrial society from the Meiji Restoration, the SATOYAMA landscape had been relatively well preserved in many places until several decades ago. However, as their instrumental value related to plant resource exploitation has been totally lost due to thorough modernization of agriculture and daily life, most SATOYAMA ecosystems have been abandoned or destroyed through regional development projects, and this tendency has accelerated recently. Today, after substantial loss, public concern and efforts toward conservation and restoration of the SATOYAMA are growing. The importance of the SATOYAMA as sites for biodiversity conservation and/or recreational activities for urban dwellers is increasingly appreciated. People involved in the social activities to conserve and/or to restore the SATOYAMA believe that sound ecosystems such as the SATOYAMA would be indispensable to 'intergenerational long-term sustainability'.

 The SATOYAMA is thought to have a particular significance in contemporary global environmental sciences and wisdom. The special feature articles of this volume deal with conservational ecological and environmental issues on SATOYAMA ecosystems in the context of the contemporary biodiversity crisis. Our concern should be shared world-widely with many people who keenly fear for rapid biodiversity loss with decline of traditional systems in strong waves of Westernization.