施設緑地の維持管理組織へのヤギ除草導入促進方策に関する研究

抄録

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of goats for weed control in public green spaces from the perspective of reducing the environmental impact, recycling resources, and creating new landscapes, in addition to compensating for shrinking budgets and workforces of municipalities. However, due to the lack of systematic information on the challenges of organizations working on such projects, the key to successful goat weeding remains unexplored. Therefore, a trial experiment of goat weeding for organizations with no experience was conducted at five facilities, and exploratory interviews were conducted with 15 employees. The narratives obtained were presented as a time-series diagram of their experiences using the Trajectory Equifinality Modeling (TEM) approach. The factors that give rise to changes in awareness were used to identify problems in introducing goat weeding in public green spaces managed by organizations and effective measures to deal with them. The results suggest that providing training before introduction, building consensus within the organization, clarifying the division of roles in rearing work, providing feedback to rearing staff on evaluations by users of the facility and staff and establishing a goat weeding support system are important.