An area of Japan that turned to farming just 150 years ago offers a unique window into the devastating biodiversity losses associated with agriculture
Ishikari plain and Ishikari river on Hokkaido, Japan – a region that has lost many birds in 150 yearsMore than 70 per cent of birds – and a similar proportion of bird species – have disappeared in a region of Japan once occupied by hunter-gatherers and converted into farmland only a century and a half ago.
The Ishikari Lowland in north-west Japan was still inhabited by hunter-gatherer communities until the 19th century.
Kitazawa’s previous research explored the way native Japanese birds seek habitats in abandoned lands, and he wanted to know how they coped with the changes in Ishikari. “I couldn’t stop imagining, ‘How many wildlife species or individuals were there before broad-scale conversion to farmland, and how many have we lost?’” he says.
In addition, explorers had already visited and described the region in published literary works, says Kitazawa. Those explorers had described “dense forests”, filled mainly with alders and Japanese elms, and large wetlands marked by common reed and sedges. Armed with this information, Kitazawa and his colleagues divided the 8400-square-kilometre Ishikari Lowland region into 2-hectare plots and studied the land cover of each one through time using maps from 1850, 1880, 1900, 1950, 1985 and 2016. Then, having determined the changes in land cover of each plot, they took advantage of their previously validated bird population model, which generates data according to land cover type, to estimate bird species and abundance.
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