Changes in the distribution of grassland in the twentieth century in the Chugoku region of western Japan

Many plant and animal species that inhabit grassland in Japan are endangered because of habitat loss over the last century. Here, we mapped the historical distribution of grassland in the Chugoku region of western Japan using old editions of topographic maps (scale 1:50,000) and compared the histori...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Landscape and ecological engineering 2022-01, Vol.18 (1), p.125-130
Main Authors: Ohta, Yoko, Tsutsumi, Michio, Watanebe, Sonoko, Inoue, Masahito, Shirakawa, Katsunobu, Yokogawa, Masashi, Sakuma, Tomoko, Toma, Mitsuru, Takahashi, Yoshitaka
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Animal species
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Civil Engineering
Conservation
Current distribution
Endangered species
Environmental Management
Grasslands
Habitat loss
Landscape Ecology
Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning
Life Sciences
National parks
Nature Conservation
Parks & recreation areas
Plant Ecology
Topographic mapping
Topographic maps
Vegetation mapping
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Summary:Many plant and animal species that inhabit grassland in Japan are endangered because of habitat loss over the last century. Here, we mapped the historical distribution of grassland in the Chugoku region of western Japan using old editions of topographic maps (scale 1:50,000) and compared the historical distributions of grassland with the current distribution using digitized vegetation maps (scales 1:25,000 and 1:50,000). The area of grassland in the 1900s and 1950s was estimated to be 4602 km 2 (14.8% of the total area analyzed) and 3007 km 2 (9.5%), respectively. The current grassland area was estimated to be 217 km 2 (0.7%). Our results indicate that the area of grassland in the Chugoku region began to decrease during the first half of the twentieth century and sharply decreased during the second half of the twentieth century. Additionally, we evaluated the contribution of natural parks to the long-term conservation of grassland. The area of grassland maintained over a century was estimated to be 36.0 km 2 , of which 23.4 km 2 was located in natural parks. Most of the area of grassland maintained over a century was located in Akiyoshidai Quasi-National Park (10.1 km 2 ) and Daisen-Oki National Park (6.1 km 2 ). Our results show that natural parks play an important role in the long-term conservation of grassland.
ISSN:1860-1871
1860-188X
DOI:10.1007/s11355-021-00477-4