Abstract
Recently, the urban areas have been expanding in metropolis, and therefore the reduction of semi-natural environment in suburban areas has become a serious problem. In this study, the relationship between land use pattern and the distribution of Japanese field mouse (Apodemus speciosus) in the suburban area was investigated for open space effects and factors in several land use types on conserving population and maintaining corridors for the mice. The mice distributions were surveyed by the capture-recapture method of trapping in the Niiharu area, Yokohama City, Japan. As a result, the mice utilized the natural and agricultural land use and the number of captures were large in secondary forests in particular. However, no mice were collected in the urban land use, such as roads and residential areas. It was recognized that the mice could use the river bank and greenways as corridor and agricultural landscape as habitat within 100m from the forest edge. These results indicated the development of biotope mapping and prediction of suitable habitat for urban ecological network. From now on, size and distribution of urban open spaces need to be discussed.
