The 51st Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan (JES51)

[proceedings] 公募シンポジウム S09

S9-1: Nature conservation concepts and management of protected areas and landscape in Europe

By 2003, nature protected areas (PA) amounted to about 11.5 % of the earth'sland surface. However, there are still considerable gaps in the world'ssystem of PAs, e.g. concerning the oceans, semi-deserts and steppes, and theboreal and arctic regions. An area of more than 18 million qkm cannot bekept totally separated from any human influence. PAs are often inhabitatedby indigeneous peoples with traditional rights of nature use. In future, theinterrelations between local communities and PAs will play an increasingrole in the management of such areas (www.iucn.org, www.wcpa.org).
Nature Conservation strategies in many countries focus on the north americanconcept of National Parks. Indeed, National Parks are the core of the globalsystem of PAs. However, in its tendency, this concept separates nature andhuman communities and targets areas mostly in governmental or publicownership. In densely populated areas of the world the concept of NationalParks must be complemented by additional types of PAs which include more themanagement of human use and the participation of local communities indecision-making.
Europe lost almost all of its pristine nature already centuries ago.Semi-natural land is often in private or communal ownership and exposed tosome kind of traditional and/or legal rights of use, such as hunting,pasturing or gathering of wild plants. Due to a high human populationdensity and a high level of technical development unfragmented semi-naturalareas are very scarce. However, while the local biodiversity(alpha-biodiversity) may often be low, the beta-diversity on a landscapelevel is often remarkably high. Most of Europe's significant biodiversity islinked to fine-grained cultural landscapes, where natural and artificialelements are closely mingled (mosaic landscapes). This phenomenon can beunderstood by a long-lasting co-evolution between nature and local usetechniques and cultures, resp. (PLACHTER 1999, PLACHTER & PUHLMANN 2004).Thus, by its experiences to protect nature in overally used landscapesEurope may substantially contribute to the goals of the Convention onBiodiversity (CBD) as well as to strategies of a comprehensive globalnetwork of PAs.
Europe currently disposes on a broad spectrum of tools for the protection ofecosystems and landscapes, ranging from National Parks and Nature reservesto Landscape reserves, Biosphere reserves and contractual natureconservation, subsidies for nature-friendly use, and legal protection ofspecific types of ecosystems and habitats. The European Habitat Directiveturned out to be an excellent tool for the protection of natural andsemi-natural landscape elements, while nature conservation contracts supportthe persistence of a biodiverse structure of agricultural landscapes(FEDERAL AGENCY FOR NATURE CONSERVATION 1999).
The major challenge of current nature conservation strategies is to findmore sustainable, nature-friendly and socio-economically acceptable kinds ofuse in and beyond PAs. Experiences from reserves in private land ownershipin Europe demonstrate ways to harmonize protection goals and traditionalrights of use, legally linked to the land ownership, and strategies how toinvolve local communities in the decision-making processes on the futuredevelopment of such areas. Biosphere Reserves, which are, according to theSeville Strategy, model regions for the development of sustainable kinds ofnature use and landscape development, increasingly play a substantial rolein the nature protection strategy of Europe (UNESCO 1996).

S9-2: Nature conservation systems and protected areas in East Asia

The East Asia region is located in the eastern part of Asia, spreadingacross a wide area of 4-52属N and 73-154属E, and including eightcountries and territories of Japan, China, China - Hong Kong, China - Macau,Republic of Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Mongolia, ChineseTaiwan. The total land area covers almost 12 million km², that isabout 8% of global total area and 23% of Eurasia. The region encompasses adiverse array of climatic zones, geomorphological types, ecosystems. Fromthe east and the west, there is a transition from forests to deserts throughsteppes. From the south to the north, the zonal vegetation distribution iscomposed of tropical evergreen broadleaf forests, north tropical seasonalrain forests, subtropics mixed evergreen and deciduous forests, temperatedeciduous broadleaf forests, temperate mixed coniferous and deciduousbroadleaf forests, cold temperate boreal coniferous forests. The East Asiajurisdictions share a long and complex history, with each jurisdictionpossessing a unique history, government, size and landscape. Due to thelarge variety that exists within the East Asia jurisdictions, all protectedareas must take into account many items distinct to the rich and diversegeographical and cultural environments in which each jurisdiction is found.The act of conserving nature and natural resources dates back to ancienttimes in many of the East Asia jurisdictions. Concepts of nature and natureprotection are linked to ancient religious philosophies and practices ofConfucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Thousand of years ago, some of thesecultures were aware of relationships between conservation and utilization ofnatural resources and survival. Even though the concept of nature protectionhas existed for centuries, the creation of modern day legislation andsystems of legally protected areas has occurred within the last century. Thesmall and densely populated country of Japan was a first attempt toestablish a modern day park system through official government legislation.Protected area legislation and laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.Even though the specific details of legislation differ, the intent behindthe legislation is common to all jurisdictions - legally to identify andprotect a system of naturally and culturally significant areas.Jurisdictions in East Asia vary in the classification and titles ofadministrative systems as well as in the types of management organizationsthat look after parks and protected areas. Some are highly centralized andutilize a top-down approach. Others extend greater authority to regionalmanagement units. Even though government agencies that oversee protectedarea systems are not the same, some features are common to the variousjurisdictions. All of the park systems in East Asia use some form of zoningsystem that identifies varying levels of appropriate use and protection indifferent areas of the park or protected area. The protection and use ofeach area varies along a continuum, with strict protection and no human useat one extreme, and high human use and some infrastructure development atthe other extreme. Between these two end points are varying degrees of useand development versus protection and conservation.

S9-3: National strategy and environmental policy for reserved area of Korea

Comprehensive and necessary considerations arisen from the view of landscapeecology were discussed for the present situations of wildlife conservationand management in Korea compared with other countries. Especially, theconservation strategy and policy of biodiversity were addressed in broadsenses including habitat protections, legal approaches, and ecologicalnetwork programs. The principle of "network system" is used, from theviewpoint of landscape ecology, as the strategy to obtain various types ofpatches where the diverse organisms live and, it is also used to improve thequality of biodiversity and to reinforce the recent policies forconservation and management of wildlife such as establishment of naturereserves. The strategy is called "ecological network", "biotope network" or"habitat network" by the countries. The strategy is for the improvement ofecosystem quality in an entire region. It works by connecting the core areasunder protection and restoration in the widely ranged aspect on theassumption that ecological corridors are effective for migration anddistribution of animals. By doing so, the habitats existing in the regioncan be kept either systemically or flexibly in the connected system. Suchconcept and method of ecological networks is being actively proceeded inEuropean countries starting from Germany as well as in the USA and Japan. Ithas also been especially developed, being classified to the plans forutilization of lands and the plans for utilization of landscape ecology.Core areas should be regions with high biodiversity and highnaturalness that have the typical and representative habitats where the rareand endangered species live. Core areas should also be larger than theminimum-sized area required for the survival of organisms. In Europe,domestically and internationally, the required minimum size of the core areais 500 ha. Ecological corridors should be areas with good connectionwith core areas. They should function as temporary habitats and routines formigration and distribution. In choosing ecological corridors, the size ofcore areas for connection and the distance from adjacent habitats andexistence of obstacles should be considered. Nature development areasshould have some naturalness and should function as buffer zone thatprevents the habitats in core area and corridors from artificial influence.They are also the restoration places for nature to reinforce and expand theecological networks. This issue is effectively concerned with natureresource management and sustainable development in environmental policy inEast Asian countries. Finally, authors suggested that landscape ecology haveto role of the baseline framework not only for ecological research andmonitoring but also general protocol of environmental policy in changingworld.

S9-4: Nature conservation systems and management of protected areas in Japan

As for the conservation system in Japan, the embryo is seen in the Edo era.The protection of the forest resources, the protection of the wild animalsfor the hunting, the forest conservation and the reforestation for theprevention of natural disaster, or the protection of the scenic area and theplace of scenic beauty where people gather to the sightseeing are theexample. In the great reform of the society, which accompanies Meijirestoration, such social regulation and a model showed confusion temporarilybut were replaced in the modern legal system in order. In 1931, the NationalPark Law was established, which aims to contribute to national health care,recreation and edification, protecting the large scale of natural scenicbeauty area and improving appropriate use. After World War II, the numberand the area of the natural parks, which consists of National Parks, QuasiNational Parks and prefectural natural parks, increased rapidly becausethere were local requests which aims to win the foreign currency and thelocal promotion by the sightseeing promotion. In the process of the higheconomic growth in Japan, a wide range of development brought about thealteration of the natural environment in the country, but the natural parksplayed a role of the bulwark against to the development pressure, too. TheNature Conservation Law was established in 1972 after the Environment Agencyis established in 1971, which has the character of the fundamental law forthe natural environment conservation, whereas has a reserve system of thewilderness area which embodied the thought of the ecosystem preservation init. In March 2002, the revised edition of National Biodiversity Strategy wasworked out. It is the total plan of the mid and long term naturalenvironment conservation policy of Japanese government and one of the threepolicy directions is "Reinforce Conservation Efforts". Reinforce theprotected-area system, expand the designation of protected areas, improveconservation and management activities based on scientific data, preventspecies extinction, respond to the problems of alien species, and so on.These reinforcement efforts must be in accordance with the conditions ofbiodiversity crisis risk.

S9-5: Landscape architecture in National Parks for civilian utilization and ecotourism

Let me first introduce to the distinguished members of the EcologicalSociety why I established a company with emphasis upon ecology 32 years agoand how the company, now successfully having become one of the companiesopen on the stock market, worked up to now.
It was a lecture by Prof. Tatsuo Kira I attended in 1958 and the book ofE.P.Odum that inspired interest in ecology in me. As a university studentwho was studying landscape architecture in the forestry department of anagriculture faculty, I came to think that it would be interesting if ecologywas applied to landscape architecture; as a result, I chose a study on thehabitat segregation of turfs in relation to trampling as the theme on mygraduation thesis. Graduating from the university in 1960, I got a job inthe Planning Section of the National Park Department of the Ministry ofHealth and Welfare, where I was gifted with opportunities to work in avariety of important projects including those for the protection ofYakushima, Iriomote, and the Ogasawara Islands. Among those projects, theplanning of the protection of Oze is especially memorable to me. Back then,visitors were allowed to walk anywhere in Oze and the wetlands of the areawere facing risks of deterioration. As a measure to protect those wetlands,I introduced a ban on entry into wetlands, set up double-lane wooden paths,and prohibited urban transportation facilities. It was around this time thatI published an article proposing that landscape architects should learn fromecology and incorporate it into their methodologies and techniques; to mybewilderment, that opinion of mine received severe criticism both from theEcological Society and the Institute of Landscape Architecture. Nonethelessbelieving that ecological science provides necessary knowledge for landscapearchitecture and nature protection, I set up a company to do research,planning, and designing with a central focus upon ecology. After 32 years, Iam still convinced that such approach is right. Now ``ecology'' has become aword that almost everybody knows. At the symposium, examples of applicationof ecological concepts and technologies will be introduced from myexperiences at Nikko, Yakushima and the Minamijima of the Ogasawara Islandsto show how ecology is practically applied in the field of landscapearchitecture, especially in efforts to protect the natural environment and landscape:The case of Nikko concerns the control of feral deer and theprotection of plants at Senjogahara; the case of Yakushima concerns therestoration plan for the heavily damaged mountain paths; and the case of theOgasawara Islands concerns the control of utilization on a limestone island.