Social Characteristics and Sustainability of Residents-Led Biological Monitoring in Japanese Agricultural Landscapes

Abstract

Biological monitoring in agricultural landscapes is conducted as part of local residential activities in some rural regions. Such survey activities are expected to have social effects such as environmental education and community empowerment, in addition to biodiversity monitoring. However, it remains unclear how residents conduct the biological surveys, assess the sustainability of the activities, and identify potential effects on their communities. This study aims to clarify the social characteristics of biological surveys by residents and examine the sustainability of the activities. The survey reports of 37 local activities in aquatic habitats of rice-farming landscapes in the city of Utsunomiya in the Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, were collected. By using the reports, the basic activity features of the surveys, such as the number and the attributes of participants, the time, dates and sites of the surveys, were examined, and the local organizations were clustered based on the similarities of the features. Finally, the number of detected species by the biological surveys and the contents of group discussions, which were held after the surveys, in each cluster were compared. The results showed that the number of participants of the biological surveys ranged from 11 to 235, and the participation rate of children was high at 94.1%, while the participation rate of experts was low at 20.6%. Our main findings are as follows: (1) the residential organizations with invited biological experts detected the highest number of species. (2) the cluster with no children tended to have no discussion. In conclusion, our findings imply that expert participation is vital for finding species and that child participation is essential for sustainability of this biological monitoring.