A Study on the potential of the citizen-participatory biodiversity monitoring in making Green Master Plan

Abstract

Municipal governments in Japan are recommended to put emphasis on the view point of biodiversity in the “Green Master Plan (GMP)”, which is a basic plan for spatial policies for the parks, green spaces environment, and landscape. Since the citizen-participatory biodiversity monitoring is expected to be one of the effective tools to enhance the feasibility of GMP in biodiversity conservation, the authors discussed the role of the citizen-participatory biodiversity monitoring in the GMP by examining the 38 plans. While it was found that a relatively large number of GMPs clarified the role of the citizen-participatory biodiversity monitoring as a tool for public awareness campaign and biodiversity survey, few GMPs utilized the result of citizen-participatory biodiversity monitoring as a reference for setting the goal of the plan. In those few cases, municipal governments work together on citizen-participatory biodiversity monitoring not only with citizens, but also with experts or research institutes to enhance the reliability of data. Based on the results, the authors discussed necessary measures to promote the application of the citizen-participatory biodiversity monitoring to administrative plans such as GMP.