Abstract
The traditional Japanese rural landscape (satoyama) is composed of grasslands, paddy wetlands, and coppice woodlands. This landscape, which is rich in biodiversity and traditional regional culture, is considered a potential source of biomass production for renewable energy. Coppice woodlands have limited tree species diversity due to frequent felling, and grassland species dominate on the forest floor. Outstanding biodiversity in grassland species and wetland species is the typical property of the satoyama-landscape. Because the large-scale (>100 km) distribution of biodiversity in this landscape is not known, we developed a method to evaluate measure it directly that involvedby a ground survey along a very long line-transect. and We mapping mapped of indicator plant species of grassland and paddy wetland along the survey lines, and counted the number of grassland species and paddy wetland species. We identified rich satoyama-landscape biodiversity in both grassland and paddy wetland herbs in the northeastern Kanto region. (northern Ibaraki Prefecture and eastern Tochigi Prefecture), bBut centers of richness differed between the systems, and Ggrassland species were plentiful in cool areas and paddy wetland species were plentiful in warm lowland areas. We need to conserve both typical traditional ruralsatotoyama -landscapes, with their rich biological diversity (northeastern Kanto region), and centers of richness of grassland and paddy-wetland species.
