2020 Volume 25 Issue 2 Article ID: 2009
We investigated the flora and vegetation of a coastal sandbar forest in Honshu, Japan, soon after mounding and afforestation as part of infrastructure reconstruction following the Great East Japan Earthquake. Our objective was to estimate plant diversity following these management practices. The mounds at the study site were characterised by low vegetation and high bare-soil cover, and were dominated by annual or perennial herbs associated with early secondary succession. We found a small number of woody plants and only one tree species, Pinus thunbergii. Three coastal plant species were found, all of which had low rates of cover. Approximately 40% of all recorded taxa were naturalised species (23 taxa), all of which also had low rates of cover. In total, we recorded 58 vascular plant taxa, many of which had been reported from the coastal forest or roadside areas on the sandbar prior to the earthquake. However, the mounding materials comprising sand obtained from sandstone in the adjacent hills probably contained few buried seeds. We suggest that many of the taxa we observed had been transported from neighbouring areas. Since this study was limited to a small area, we suggest that further work is needed to understand fully the effects of the infrastructure reconstruction activities, such as mounding, that were used across eastern Japan following the earthquake.
