Assessment of the potential of forests to provide brushwood for use in the traditional Kurama Fire Festival

Abstract

Traditionally, brushwood used for making torches which play an essential role in the traditional Kurama Fire Festival has been gathered in local satoyama forests by local residents. In recent years, however, the sustainable procurement of brushwood has become an issue. To clarify the potential of the local forests to continuously procure the brushwood needed for the annual fire festival, this study identified the ecological characteristics of past brushwood harvest sites and assessed the “brushwood harvest potential” of local forests, that is, the quantity and quality of brushwood that can be expected to be obtained from the forests in a sustainable way. We conducted vegetation surveys in 13 of the sites that have been used for brushwood harvesting during the last 18 years. We assessed the brushwood harvest potential based on the occurrence of species that are suitable for brushwood in the forest floor vegetation and among growing trees. The results showed that survey sites with a high brushwood harvest potential could be classified as those with a high possibility for the growth of high-quality brushwood, those that contributed to a stable supply of the quantity of brushwood, and those that possessed both qualities. Furthermore, sites with a high brushwood harvest potential tended to have a high dominance of red pine.