This study examines the possibility of using the natural environment and geographical features for disaster risk reduction. This is from the viewpoint of ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction (Eco-DRR) in the area, which is assumed one of the areas to be inundated by the tsunami caused by the Nankai Trough earthquake in the future. Questionnaires were distributed to each household in the coastal area in Nankoku City, Kochi prefecture in January 2016. In total, 419 respondents participated in the survey. The results indicated that 70–80% of the residents in the area regarded earthquakes and tsunamis as hazards. On the other hand, respondents living within 300 m of the coastline regarded the ocean as being more hazardous but charming. Furthermore, tsunami evacuation towers were evaluated positively, and the protection of human lives was regarded as a priority when they participated in consensus building. Countermeasures such as self-aid, mutual aid, earthquake-proofing residences and public facilities, and the prevention of furniture overturning were also expected. In addition, long-term perspectives were related to the conscious use of the natural environment and geographical features; thus, this way of thinking is considered important in promoting Eco-DRR in the assumed tsunami inundation area.

Since the Nankai Megathrust Earthquake and Tokyo Inland Earthquake are predicted to occur in the near future, disaster prevention have become urgent issues in urban planning in Japan. Therefore, municipal governments in Japan are required to implement disaster prevention systematically by making use of green and open spaces. In this study, the authors analyzed the role of the “Green Master Plan (GMP)” in disaster risk reduction through 72 case studies. As a result, it was revealed that there are a lot of GMPs which refers to the disaster prevention, while their specific measures vary a lot depending on the past disaster experience and geographic condition. It was also found that a lot of GMPs designate green and open spaces like urban parks as evacuation sites for mega earthquake or large fire. As a conclusion, the authors pointed out the future tasks for the landscape and urban planning in Japan in order to enhance the role of green and open spaces in disaster prevention.

The aim of this study was to investigate exterior greenery at public facilities. To clarify the relationship between the guidelines and the public’s evaluation of exterior spaces, we the following steps were taken: 1) a literature review was carr ied out on this subject and local government personnel were interviewed to compare the coverage of the greenery guidelines; 2) a questionnaire was distributed to determine the elements considered in the public’s evaluation of exterior spaces. The purpose of the greenery guidelines is not only to ensure environmental protection, but also to encourage user and regional contribution. Overall, the exterior spaces that had greenery as per the guidelines received a good evaluation from the public. However, qui te a few users were not satisfied with the greenery in external spaces. We found that the public had a strong emotional connection with greenery and thus sought more greenery in their external spaces. The future challenge of exterior greenery projects is maintenance and continuation. To enable this, exterior greenery must be perceived as an important asset.

This research aims to make clear the farmland restoration volunteer attribution and consciousness, and the volunteer experiences before after of this disaster of the Torrential Rainfall in Northern Kyushu in July 2012. The questioner research carried out to NPO Sansonjyuku’s volunteer, 897 persons by post mail, and three private company by web mail from Nov. 27, 2014 to Jan. 31, 2015. As a result, post mail recovery rate was 30.2%. Most high portion of volunteer occupation etc. were the private company worker, 40’s and Fukuoka city urban peoples. People who have experience with NPO Sansonjyuku before disaster carried out volunteer recruiting. The volunteers worked 2.97day per person during one year and eight months as average, and the repeat rate was 49.0 %. In terms of volunteer experiences of before disaster, 33.7% volunteers had the disaster volunteer experience, and 76.1% volunteer had experience that had visited to this region. As for NPO Sansonjyuku volunteer seems around ten percent both before and after of disaster. Thus, this research confirmed that the importance of activities in farm village from before the disaster, not only the conservation volunteer but also tourism so on.

The aim of this research is to clarify the actual condition of continuous preservation activities in hilly and mountainous areas. Specifically, it is as follows；1)volunteer system with the fund of Tochigi Pre, 2) the contents of activity, 3)volunteer's consciousness. The preparation period of "Organization of Collaboration for Local Resources in Tochigi Pre." is in 2002 - 2004. The organization which established in 2005 is working in 2016. Researching methods are documentation, interview, participant observation, and questionnaire. The candidate for investigation is as follows；1) Agricultural Policy Planning Department in Tochigi Prefecture, 2) Tochigi Agriculture Public Corporation, 3) organization in hilly and mountainous areas, 4) volunteers. The result is as follows：1)administration is managing the volunteer continuously by fund and cooperation， 2)cooperation is towns and cities, an organization of management, and organization of hilly and mountainous areas， 3)registration of a volunteer member enables continued activity. Volunteer's participating motive is as follow;1)the contribution of environmental conservation activities，2)experience of a beautiful scene and wonderful Satoyama．Activity of hope is as follows; 1) cutting of weeds，2)maintenance of irrigation canal，3)afforestation，4)preservation of ecosystem.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the background and objective of green infrastructure implementation, opportunities and method of green infrastructure installation, implementation system of green infrastructure, funding, and policy context of green infrastructure implementation in selected green infrastructure-related projects that were carried out for the main purpose of adapting climate change, particularly alleviating a flood risk by using ecosystem service in England. And through above study, we preliminarily discussed the things that contribute to green infrastructure introduction into Japan. In particular, we understood the actual conditions of green infrastructure implementation through bibliographic survey and fieldwork on distinguishing examples of green infrastructure installation into each three types of the site (road, river and public park) that were selected by taking specialist’s opinion and the information from authoritative sources into consideration.

New York City has been implementing the watershed protection program based on the concept of Payment for Ecosystem Services for over 20 years. In this program, the Agricultural Conservation Easement (ACE) is used to designate farmland that provides a secure sustainable supply of ecosystem services. Clarifying the advantages and disadvantages of ACE will help give us valuable insight into its applicability as a Japanese conservation tools. We conducted a study that outlines the agricultural conservation easement (AEC) process, clarifying the characteristics of ACE as the system for sustainable stewardship and as the conservation tool tied to the development in urban centers. The results suggest that conservation system for sustainable supply of Ecosystem Services from farmland has several requirements: 1) a farmland appraisal system that takes into account the farming plan of the individual parcel, 2) technical support for farming viability in addition to easement payments, 3) a strategy based upon the purchase of continuous small farmlands is also important in order to enhance the sustainability of Ecosystem Services in the region as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify, how changing functional evaluations of green spaces correlate with road maps of spatial policies in the green space planning process in municipalities. Through surveys about Kawasaki City, Zushi City and Kamakura City in Kanagawa Prefecture, the following trend could be pointed out: Formerly, functional evaluations were conducted for relatively large areas in municipalities, focusing on the overall structure of green spaces. Those evaluations contributed to establishing typologies or divisions over the area, some of which were used as references in road maps of spatial policies. Later however, evaluations were conducted for limited areas in municipalities, where the main issue was relatively small green spaces in local communities. These evaluations contributed to the extraction of specific green spaces for the practical implementation of concrete spatial policies.

Iriomote Island in Okinawa is now receiving a lot of attention because the National Park area was recently expanded to cover almost the entire island. Being the next promising candidate for a World Natural Heritage Site title, an investigation was conducted. The purpose of this study is to investigate the history of land use in Iriomote from the 1960s and analyze the transition as well as its sociocultural backgrounds to extract the factors that may affect land use. Land use analysis and a field research were conducted, the former was conducted by analyzing topographical map with scale 1/50,000 and aerial photographs, and the latter was conducted to obtain actual land use data. Interviews were also used to reveal historical backgrounds. The results show that the changes in land use have been mainly affected by demographic changes, this is closely related to the changes in lifestyle and culture. Significant differences found in land use between the western and the eastern parts of the island were attributed to the history of the villages.

The objective of this study was to evaluate observer's impressions of roost containing behavior and to assess the effectiveness of awareness efforts regarding the conservation of the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica), which is endangered in Japan. In Kanagawa Prefecture retarding park, a group of observers habitually meets to observe the roost containing of the barn swallow, and a questionnaire was administered to 97 participants recruited from this group. Analysis using the semantic differential method revealed the impressions of swallow roost containing to be as follows: 1) There was a high tendency to have a positive impression with or without observation experience. 2) There was a tendency to feel the beauty, a sense of oneness with nature and the life force. The questionnaire description had many comments that awareness regarding swallow conservation has improved, and that observation of the roost containing educates the public about the environment. Observation of the visual scene created by the roost containing the swallows was found to contribute to improving awareness regarding the conservation of swallows in Kanagawa Prefecture.

Though factors influencing species composition in urban patchy woodlands have been studied, the ecological meanings of surrounding residential areas are still unclear. In residential areas in the Chiba City we surveyed relationship between bird species composition and land attributes such as vegetation structure and land cover considering landscape conditions indicated by the distance from the nearest large woodland and vegetation index, to clarify the factors influencing bird species composition, from January to March (wintering season) and April to June (breeding season) in 2009. The results were as follows. 1) Sixteen "urban avoider" species were recorded through the survey, which suggested that residential areas can play a role of movement pass for such species. 2) RDA (Redundancy Analysis) extracted three major axes of species compositional change in each season. Vegetation coverage of trees, agricultural land cover, coverage of grassland and distance from the nearest large (>5ha) woodland were significantly correlated with the axes. 3) The results indicated that two "urbanization gradients" could be considered in the residential area: one is the compositional gradient of woodland species and the other is that of grassland species.

We set up 1055 quadrats (1055m²) on the forest floor in Tadasu-No-Mori forest, a large-scale mature urban forest in Kyoto city, to clarify the growth characteristics, recruitment, relative height growth rate and mortality of seedlings of three evergreen Fagaceae species, Castanopsis spp, Quercus glauca and Q. myrsinifolia. We recognized the differences in growth characteristics of seedlings among the species. Q. glauca showed high recruitment rates. It seems to be because the individual density of mature trees of Q. glauca was highest in this forest. Recruitment rates of C. spp and Q. myrsinifolia seedlings were relatively high, when the individual density of the mother trees which is located near, was high. Although C. spp seedlings showed higher growth rate than other two species, mortality rate of C. spp seedlings were relatively high. In contrast, mortality rate of Q. myrsinifolia seedlings were relatively low. It indicates that the individual density of Q. myrsinifolia might increase than other two species in this site in the long term. In order to conserve the original vegetation of Tadasu-No-Mori forest, the deciduous broad-leaved forest dominated by Aphananthe aspera, Celtis sinensis and Zelkova serrata and to suppress the regeneration of Q. myrsinifolia, it is necessary to maintain the population density of the mature trees of Q. myrsinifolia low.

In this paper, we propose a vegetation monitoring with the collaboration of citizens and expert at the riverbank of the Tone canal, Chiba, Japan as advanced case study of the biodiversity monitoring. The monitor ing had started since that a citizens’ group cared about the changing method of the vegetation management of the Tone canal riverbank by Edogawa River Office. The leader of the group asked experts advice for vegetation monitoring. The expert held workshop to examining monitoring method, advised in fieldwork, and summarized results. The experts particularly supported technical aspect of each phase to deepen citizen’s understanding. The results of the monitoring were useful and easy to understand. This case study is a role model of the collaborative monitoring, because citizens and experts have collaborated consistently from examining the monitoring design with introducing citizens’ attentive observations for local nature. The deep-rooted collaboration with River Office are needed to develop this case study to ideal adaptive ecosystem management. To enhance and to spread collaborative monitoring, linking the network of the citizens and experts are needed.

The purpose of this investigation is to reveal the possibility of urban small green space on building roofs and sites providing for the urban ecosystem. On that account we grasped the characteristics of these green spaces and the actual situat ion of bird distribution in Osaka City. From results of the investigation, the relationship was verified by using correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis. In consequence, it was found that the biodiversity tends to improve as the amount of green increases, and the impact of shrubs is particularly strong. In addition, Horomis diphone and Aegithalos caudatus were influenced by the presence of certain trees. Furthermore, the influence of the internal environment on the birds was mainly confirmed in these green spaces but the external environment was not much. Based upon these results, the stratification of plants was important on narrow urban green spaces, especially on the rooftop green space. This study has shown that improving quality of internal environment influence bird distribution in these green spaces. At last, making such green spaces and their connection may contribute to the urban ecosystem.