Current Ecology Issues

This blog post is part of the blog series ‘Authors in Asia’, which complements the recent Virtual Issue in Journal of Applied Ecology. You can read other posts in this series here.

In this post Associate Editor Akira S Mori discusses the research currently being undertaken in his laboratory to tackle environmental and ecological challenges and how this work can help to inform landscape management and policy in Japan.

There is an increasing recognition of the current environmental and ecological crisis in Japan. The country is the world’s third-largest economy by nominal gross domestic product (GDP). The country historically has a large population in the small land areas of the archipelago, and now has a population of over 120 million. Because of such high population density, landscapes and seascapes in Japan have been historically largely affected by human activities including urbanization, extensive conversion from natural vegetation to plantations, agricultural and aquacultural intensification, and so on. Many environmental issues such as water and air pollution have been substantially improved but there still remain many concerns such as climate warming and biodiversity declines. Ecological consequences resulting from these modern issues have large uncertainty, and people including ecologists are facing difficulties.

Here I introduce ongoing applied ecology studies from our laboratory (Mori Ecology Lab) as an example of how scholars in Japan are tackling environmental and ecological issues. Although the approaches we employ are very diverse (field work, simulation, data synthesis and so on), our lab has a main focus on field-based evidence and application of this knowledge to real-world issues.