Long-term change of alpine vegetation revealed by past photographs

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24651003
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Environmental dynamic analysis
• Research Institution: University of Tsukuba
• Principal Investigator: SHIMONO Ayako 筑波大学, 生命環境系, 助教 (30401194)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): OGUMA Hiroyuki 国立研究開発法人国立環境研究所, 環境計測研究センター, 研究員 (10342734)
• Co-Investigator(Renkei-kenkyūsha): YONE Yasumichi 島根大学, 生物資源科学部, 准教授 (30467716)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 植生変化 / 写真解析 / 山岳環境

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Recently, anthropogenic vegetation change has been documented in various mountain regions of the world. However, it’s still not clear whether vegetation changes occur or not in most of Japanese mountains. One of the major reasons of such ambiguous knowledge is the lack of old vegetation investigations at the high altitude regions.　Past photographs are potentially valuable to collect information about the vegetation change in mountain area by comparing recent photographs. Therefore, we made a database to store time series mountain photographs.
I have retaken the new pictures at same place in same season with old pictures and compared the new one with old one. These pictures were geometrically corrected and utilized to detect vegetation change quantitatively.

Free Research Field

植物生態学