Forest Landscape Biodiversity Measurement by Land Use Diversity Index

抄録

The scope of forest planning is rapidly extending beyond traditional timber production to sustainable management of biodiversity. Biodiversity in forestry usually refers to variety of species but also includes genetic variations and spatial variations of landscape. The usual approaches in forest biodiversity quantification, however, face fundamental problems in measurement and analysis, because diversity is a particularly complex and difficult subject at the landscape-level. In this study, we evaluate forest compartments of the Miya River Watershed, Mie Prefecture in Japan with a newly proposed index of landscape biodiversity called the Land Use Diversity Index (LUDI). The results of this study indicated that the LUDI was an effective method both for calculating forest landscape biodiversity and for planning tactical forest management. In particular, by using empirical information on forest vegetation, we were able to detect areas of forest that were most and least important for maintenance of biodiversity in forest planning.