Land-use configuration under traditional agriculture in the Kanto Plain,Japan: a historical GIS analysis |
| |
| Authors: | DS Sprague |
| |
| Institution: | 1. Ecosystem Informatics Division , National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences , Tsukuba , Japan Sprague@niaes.affrc.go.jp |
| |
| Abstract: | Under traditional agriculture, Japanese farm communities arranged land uses to collect natural resources from the surrounding landscape to support intensive cultivation nearby villages. This may have produced a land-use pattern analogous to the European infield–outfield system, a type of concentric ring model of land use centered on villages. This study applies a multiple buffer analysis to a Japanese rural landscape depicted in historical maps surveyed in the 1880s, to investigate the spatial patterns that had existed under traditional agriculture for a study area in the Kanto Plain near Tokyo. About 60% of the landscape depicted in the map area consisted of woodlands and grasslands. The land-use pattern combined a concentric ring pattern centered on villages and a parallel band pattern arrayed across the upland plateau between rice paddies. The modal distance from villages to rice paddies was about 400 m, suggesting that the villages were deliberately located at this distance along the rice paddies in the long, narrow river valleys. The distance distribution of other land uses suggests that high priority was given to locating dry fields close to villages, and grasslands in the center of the upland plateau, while woodlands followed a distribution expected from the distances available within the map area. The analysis lends support to the suggestion that traditional rural landscapes were not a random mosaic of various land uses, but often had a spatial structure, that can be accounted in plans to preserve or restore them. The multiple buffer analysis also suggests that distance from key landscape features, in itself, can be considered a limited spatial resource because only a limited amount of area exists for each distance zone. |
| |
| Keywords: | traditional agriculture rural land use infield–outfield multiple buffer analysis Japan |
|
|
