Abstract
Abstract. Vegetation and land cover in Japan are rapidly changing. Abandoned farmland in 2010, for example, was 396,000 ha, or triple that of 1985. Efficient monitoring of changes in land cover is vital to both conservation of biodiversity and sustainable regional development. The Ministry of Environment is currently producing 1/25,000 scale vegetation maps for all of Japan, but the work is not yet completed. Traditional research is time consuming, and has difficulty coping with the rapid nature of change in the modern world. In this situation, classification of various scale remotely sensed data can be of premier use for efficient and timely monitoring of changes in vegetation.. In this research Terra/MODIS data is utilized to classify land cover in all of eastern Japan. Emphasis is placed on the Tohoku area, where large scale and rapid changes in vegetation have occurred in the aftermath of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011. Large sections of coastal forest and agricultural lands, for example, were directly damaged by the earthquake or inundated by subsequent tsunami. Agricultural land was also abandoned due to radioactive contamination from the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. The classification results are interpreted within the framework of a Landscape Transformation Sere model developed by Hara et al (2010), which presents a multi-staged pattern for tracking vegetation changes under successively heavy levels of human interference. The results of the research will be useful for balancing conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems with the needs for regional redevelopment.
Highlights
Vegetation and land cover in Japan are rapidly changing
This paper reports on the first step in this project, which is to generate a land cover map for eastern Japan that can be put to immediate use in the areas impacted by the earthquake and tsunami of 2011
At Tokyo University of Information Sciences (TUIS), MODIS data from the Terra and Aqua satellites has been directly acquired since November of 2000, and VIIRS data from the Suomi-NPP satellite since May of 2001. 500m resolution atmospherically-corrected MODIS data sets have been archived since 2001
Summary
Vegetation and land cover in Japan are rapidly changing. Over the past half century, for example, coppices and other managed secondary woodlands, which had formerly provided various vital ecosystem services, were abandoned when fossil fuels replaced firewood and charcoal as the main source of energy. In Japan, basic national level data for ecosystem and biodiversity conservation were first produced by the Ministry of Environment (MOE) National Survey of the Natural Environment project, which lasted from 1973 to 1998 These 1/50,000 scale maps provided a crucial understanding of Japan’s vegetation patterns, and for several decades were the standard reference work for ecological studies and environmental impact assessments. TUIS, acquires MODIS data at three spots; Miyake Island in the southern Ryukyus, the main campus near Tokyo in central Honshu, and Abashiri along the Sea Of Okhotsk in eastern Hokkaido This allows high frequency data acquisition over an area stretching from the Philippine Sea to the Okhotsk Sea. As a result, monthly composite data sets with the effects of cloud cover removed can be used to construct time sequences that follow seasonal changes in vegetation (Hara et al 2010 and Harada et al 2014).
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