Elsevier

Ecological Indicators

Volume 97, February 2019, Pages 204-210
Ecological Indicators

Resource amount and cultural legacy affect spatially unbalanced human use of Japan’s non-timber forest products

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2018.10.017Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Index of resource use balance in wild edible and medicinal plants was developed.

  • Widely forest covered region showed under-use according to high resource amount.

  • Snowy region showed over-use according to high plant growth and long historical use.

  • Both environmental and social factors affect human use balance.

  • Resource amount and cultural legacy should be considered for sustainable use.

Abstract

Provisioning is a basic forest ecosystem service, and the balance between human usage and natural resources that provide this service is crucial for sustainability. Here, we describe a spatial mismatch between monetary-equivalent production (actual use of this service) and the estimated potential supply of edible and medicinal wild plants in Japan, and how the balance between actual use and potential supply is determined. Most regions exhibit under-use (potential > actual), especially in regions with large forest areas, presumably because of limited accessibility or abandonment. Over-use (actual > potential) is prevalent in regions with a snowy climate, which might increase plant quantity and quality by supplying enough water. Cultural legacy also affected high plant usage in snowy regions. These results demonstrate how social and climatic factors cause imbalanced human usage of ecosystem services, and provide insights for future ecosystem management, such as alarming over-use and building capacity where under-use occurs.

Introduction

Since ancient times, human society has depended on wide range of ecosystem services (Habu et al., 2011, Gosling and Williams, 2013, Lopez-Angarita et al., 2016). Ecosystem services emerge from interactions among local human needs (e.g., demand for services), ecosystem capacity to provide these services, access to the ecosystem, and ecosystem functions (Kremen, 2005, Villamagna et al., 2014, Rova and Pranovi, 2017). These interactions result from dynamic and spatially heterogeneous processes. As a consequence, each local human community has developed unique characteristics in terms of its pattern of dependence on ecosystem services (Guarrera and Lucia, 2007, Pushpangadan et al., 2012, Obon et al., 2014). However, imbalances among these processes cause unstable human usage relative to the amount natural resources, leading to over-use or under-use of ecosystem services (Bugalho et al., 2011). Over-use typically causes progressive damage to the sustainability of ecological functioning and, thus, decreases the supply of ecosystem services, but under-use has relatively recently been recognized as a driver of unsustainability (Takeuchi, 2010, Bugalho et al., 2011). Social drivers behind over-use are often related to poverty, especially for highly valuable natural items, whereas under-use happens mostly in developed countries because of the loss of traditional ecosystem uses (e.g., the loss of anthropogenic management reduces disturbance promoted natural items) (Bugalho et al., 2011). Furthermore, spatial mismatches between human usage and natural resources happen both at national and local scales (Chen et al., 2009, Heubes et al., 2012). Multiple scale assessment for the balance between them is therefore necessary for sustainable use of ecosystem services.

The provisioning services that supply food and medicines are among the most basic ecosystem services, and non-timber forest products (NTFPs) often play a major role in delivery of these services (Arnold and Perez, 2001, Ticktin, 2004, Kunwar et al., 2013, Towns et al., 2014). NTFPs are especially important as a source of income in developing countries (Ticktin, 2004) and sometimes have higher monetary value than timber production or the establishment of commercial plantations (Arnold and Perez, 2001). Compared to the situation in developing countries, developed countries rely less on NTFPs, but these products still have important monetary and social values in rural areas (Ikeya, 2004). Sustainability of the ecosystem services provided by NTFPs depend greatly on environmental conditions such as climate (Lenoir et al., 2008, Higa et al., 2013, Ash et al., 2017, Koide et al., 2017), on forest management and use (Liu et al., 2014, Ustaoglu and Williams, 2017, Yoshioka et al., 2017), and on demand for local edible or medicinal wild plants (Reyes-Garcia et al., 2015, Kamiyama et al., 2016, Hatzenbuehler et al., 2017). Thus, for sustainable management of the ecosystem services provided by NTFPs, assessing both human usage (i.e., demand) and the natural resource (i.e., supply) is crucial, although our literature review revealed no studies of the spatial relationships between supply and demand on NTFPs. Some reports have assessed the spatial pattern of food or medicinal provisioning services using species distribution modeling but have not considered the relationships between these patterns and human usage of the services (Heubes et al., 2012, Schulp et al., 2014, van Andel et al., 2015).

Japanese NTFPs represent a good case study of how often and to what degree such spatial mismatches occur between actual human use and potential supply (the estimated ecosystem’s capacity to supply a natural resource) in the context of food and medicinal provisioning services. Japan has widespread NTFPs with a range of traditional and cultural uses. Edible wild plants are called sansai, and are vegetables still commonly used in traditional Japanese cuisine, which is called washoku and is part of the intangible cultural heritage of Japan defined by UNESCO. Medicinal plants have been traditionally used in Japanese medicine (kampo, which is sometimes spelled kanpo), and they still play an important role as alternatives or complements to the options provided by modern medicine (Teng et al., 2016). Partly because of this, national statistics are available on the amounts of wild edible and medicinal plants produced in Japan. By taking advantage of this information, we set the objective of this research to reveal the spatial mismatch between the human usage of NTFPs and their estimated availability in Japan. Our goals were to answer the following questions: (1) which regions of the country use more ecosystem services than the estimated potential supply (i.e., over-use) or less ecosystem services (i.e., under-use), and (2) which environmental or social characteristics were responsible for the imbalance. To quantify the balance between natural resources and human usage, we calculated the monetary-equivalent differences between actual use and potential supply of target species. We then calculated the average among target species and examined its spatial pattern to determine the pattern’s relationship with environmental and social factors.

Section snippets

Statistics for actual use data

Actual production of NTFPs in each prefecture was derived from official Japanese statistics from the 2014 census of agriculture and forestry in Japan (http://www.e-stat.go.jp/SG1/estat/List.do?lid=000001149816). We used data for the 13 species that were described as wild products in the census. We removed Okinawa Prefecture from our analysis because these species were not produced in that prefecture. This data only includes the amount of NTFPs that reached the market. To fully summarize human

Over-use and under-use

We found clear regional differences in the balance between actual human use and the estimated natural resource potential, which varied widely among the 13 NTFPs that we analyzed (Fig. 1, Table 1). According to the total difference between actual use and potential supply, prefectures that over-used these plant resources tended to be located in the northern and southern parts of the country (Fig. 1). Among the over-used items, the combination of Petasites japonicus and Petasites japonicus subsp.

Discussion

We found that forest area and maximum snow depth were most strongly correlated with over-use and under-use of the 13 NTFPs in Japan (Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Table 2). Prefectures with a large forest area (e.g., Hokkaido, Iwate, Nagano) had a large potential distribution of the NTFPs (Fig. A1), resulting in a high estimate of the resource amount. However, actual use did not reach the potential supply, presumably because of limited accessibility to the forested areas in the rural regions occupied by deep

Conclusion

OUI is a simple metric, so it would be easy to incorporate the actual use and potential supply of target species. OUI can also be used to identify spatial trends in over-use or under-use, thereby providing an objective and easy-to-understand criterion for judging the sustainability of the ecosystem services provided by NTFPs. Also, as we demonstrated in the present study, OUI is easy to relate to a range of driving factors. Such information will be valuable for decision-makers and stakeholders

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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