The purpose of this research was to analyze traffic to the research results pages on the website of the Fukushima Agricultural Technology Centre and to clarify how the information was used. Traffic to the website's home page increased in summer and decreased in winter. Website traffic to the study results pages increased beginning in the month following initial publishing and decreased when the study results for the new fiscal year were released. Traffic to individual study results tended to be highest for Fukushima Prefecture's staple farm crops such as cucumbers, tomatoes, pears, and rice. These staple farm crops rank highly in the amounts of production and shipment nationwide. Further investigation is necessary to clarify the motives for visiting the website and the motives for using the study results.

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Restaurants, food processing factories, grease trap cleaning companies, and local governments were surveyed on their awareness of the frequency and cost of grease trap cleaning, the possibility of recovering waste cooking oil contained in sewage for utilization in low-CO₂ energy production, and the expense of constructing and maintaining public sewers. Awareness concerning disposal of waste food oil into the public sewers was still low at restaurants and food processing factories; on the other hand, grease trap cleaning companies and local governments were highly aware. The results of our questionnaire indicated that new equipment for the recovery of waste food oil from wastewater would be widespread if the costs to society of cleaning blocked sewerage pipes and environmental pollution were borne by restaurants or food processing factories that disposed of waste food oil into sewerage pipes. Utilization of recovered food oil as thermal energy with reduction of CO₂ emission could contribute to reducing the costs of installing such a system for recovering waste food oil from wastewater. From the viewpoint of local government, it was clear that improving the social and environmental awareness of restaurants and food processing factories and strict management under administrative regulation would more effectively keep sewerage pipes from being blocked by waste food oil than would constructing and rebuilding the drainage system.

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The integrated benefit payback ratio (IBPR) is proposed as a method for evaluating biofuel production systems. This is based on the theory of a sigmoid function expressing the degree of satisfaction for an energy benefit and a multi-attribute utility function to integrate multiple benefits to make up for inadequacy of energy payback ratio (EPR). The total annual amounts of automobile mileage and household heating in Utsunomiya City were expressed as a satisfaction function. The IBPR and EPR were calculated for two biofuel (bio-ethanol) production systems utilizing biomass supplied as rice produced on abandoned paddy fields in Utsunomiya City. The total energy benefit provided to society by the biofuel production systems was able to be measured not only from the viewpoint of heat conversion but also as a multi-benefit ratio. Because an IBPR of >1.0 and an EPR of <1.0 coexisted in some trial calculations, it is clear that not only EPR but also IBPR can be used to support decisions to introduce biofuel production systems providing increasing or decreasing energy benefits to a society.

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The main objective of this study was to develop a geo-spatial information system a combining web, Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing technologies. This paper introduces an integrated web-based GIS and remote sensing architecture with three levels of geographic information services called Spatial Information System (SIS). The combinations of Java, Java applets, HTML, ASP.Net, VB Script, Java Script, SQL and web server components were utilized to develop the SIS. The prototype SIS was developed to provide an easy access to the geospatial information. Multi-temporal satellite images in Nuwaraeliya, Sri Lanka, were used for the evaluation. The SIS provides many facilities on web-based image analysis and land use/cover change detection for environmental resource management. The analyzed results of the temporal land use/cover and the vegetation cover change were presented through the web-system. Areas vulnerable to soil erosion were identified using the raster-based USLE (Universal Soil Loss Equation) tool created inside GIS environment. The web-based GIS and remote sensing tools were considered to be significantly useful for accessing geospatial data without using expensive image processing applications. The study area of this research was selected as an example and the system demonstrates the way of distributing the derived satellite images through the online with some processing tools. Therefore, this application can be used as an example on future research.

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