Abstract
To overview Satoyama biodiversity in Japan, we classified and mapped national land use into the categories "wilderness land use," "rural land use," "plantation," and "urban land use" using a high-resolution (50-m grid) land-use map. We also mapped the modified Satoyama index (M-SI), defined as the Simpson's diversity index of land-use types within a 6-km square weighted by the proportion of agricultural land use, for every rural land-use cell. National and quasi-national parks were shown to include not only higher proportions of wilderness land-use cells than areas outside parks but also significantly more rural land-use cells with high M-SI (≥0.5) than expected. However, parks along the Sanriku shoreline, which were affected by the Tohoku catastrophe and are planned for inclusion in national parks, were shown to be occupied by high numbers of plantations. Current world natural heritage sites in Japan, except for the Ogasawara Islands, were shown to include relatively few rural land-use cells, although cells with high M-SI were widely distributed in the Amami Islands, one of the candidate areas for new world natural heritage sites. From these results, we concluded that Satoyama conservation management in national parks can contribute greatly to biodiversity conservation in Japan.
