Interests of residents in the watershed environment of Shumarinai-Lake

Motohiko NAGATA, Mie University

An interview survey of residents' interests in the watershed environment of Shumarinai-lake, a

research field of the 5-2 project, was conducted in September 2005. The purpose of the survey

was to grasp residents ' attitudes toward various aspects of the watershed environment, and thus to

extract characteristics of their interests in the environment. To what extent do people have an

interest in each of functions of forests , farm, and river-lake system? Among various functions of

the watershed environment what do people think the most important? How are people concerned

in the watershed environment in everyday life? How do these things relate to the attributes of the

residents?

The survey was conducted in 4 spots in Hokkaido; Horokanai district, Shumarinai district and

Moshiri district of Horokanai town, and Nayoro city. A total of 61 respondents, 43 males and 18

females, cooperated in the interview survey. Age varied between 20 and 70 years. Among them

14 respondents were from Horokanai district, 9 from Shumarinai, 13 from Moshiri, and 25 from

Nayoro city. Their occupations were diverse including farming, forestry, dairy farming, public

servant of town office, university professor, technical official of university, graduate student, and so

on. We approached those who had been respondents of our survey in previous year, asked them

again for cooperation and asked them to introduce their acquaintances as respondents of the

interview survey. Interviewers were 5 members of the project, Yoshioka, Matsukawa, Sakamoto,

Ohkawa and Nagata.

The survey was done with a structured interview. This survey was a localized version of national

survey on people's interests in watershed environment. Question items were almost same as the

national survey except for that respondents were asked about their interests in the specific

watershed environment of Shumarinai Lake, instead of those in general, and some free answer items

were added. The question items included the degree of interest in a variety of functions of the

watershed environment, i.e., the forest, farmland, and lake and river; the frequency of leisure

activities in the watershed; the extent of interest in environment protection activities of the

watershed; opinion about the watershed; opinion about watershed environment in general, and so on.

The interview length was about 40 minutes in average.

Main results of the survey are as follows. First, frequency results showed that people's interest in

diverse functions of the watershed was very high in general. The functions asked were production

of wood, production of forest product, providing landscape, decrease of drought, water purification,

prevention of landslides and floods, soundproofing and blocking of wind, habitat of plants and

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animals, absorption of carbon dioxide (the forest), production of grain, production of vegetables and

fruits, production of dairy products, production of tea plants and so on, providing landscape,

preservation of water and land, habitat of plants and animals (farmland), water resource of daily life,

water resource for industry and agriculture, fisheries, providing landscape, habitat of plants and

animals, and water purification (river-lake). Response alternatives were 4-point scale from

'strongly interested' to 'not interested at all'.

Figure 1 shows frequency results of interest in functions of the forests. People's interests were

high for almost all functions except for 'wood production', and particularly high for 'providing

landscape', 'habitat of plants and animals' and 'water purification'. Respondents were also asked

the function of the highest interest of the forest, farmland and river-lake system. People had a high

interest in functions of 'providing landscape' of the forest, 'habitats of plants and animals',

'preservation of water and land', and 'providing landscape' of farmland, 'providing landscape' and

'water resource for daily life' of river and lake system. At the same time, people's interest in

participating in environment protection activities as well as frequency of daily activities except for

work in the watershed was relatively low.

Second, Hayashi's Quantification Method type III was applied in order to examine the structure of

interests of each function. Hayashi 's Quantification Method type III is a kind of multivariate

analysis that quantifies both the categories (response alternatives) and the subjects (respondents)

simultaneously by assigning value according to the similarity of response pattern. Figure 2 maps

the association of interests in all the functions of the forest, farmland, and river and lake. All the

functions by three levels, i.e., 'strongly interested', 'rather interested' and 'little or no interested'

were thrown into the analysis as the categories, but categories with less than 5 % response rate were

excluded. As shown in Figure 2, 3 clusters are specified, that is, clusters of 'high interest',

'moderate interest', and 'low interest'. This indicates that people who have a strong interest in one

of the functions of the watershed tend to be interested in the other functions, and people having little

interest in a function tend not to have interest in any other functions. There found no clear cluster

based on the forest, farmland and river and lake, nor cluster of direct and indirect use value.

Similar results were also obtained by analyzing interests in environment protection activities and

frequency of daily activities. People who are interested in take part in one of the activities tend to

be interested in the other activities.

Figure 3 shows the results of Hayashi 's quantification Method type III in which the functions in

which people showed the highest interest for each of the forest, farmland and river-lake were

thrown into as the categories. Three clusters were clearly found; 'landscape', 'habitat', and 'water

quality'.

Third, there were some tendencies according to attributes of the respondents. As for difference

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among 4 districts, people from Shumarinai and Horokanai had relatively higher interest in the

functions of the watershed. Interest in landscape of the watershed was especially high for

respondents from Horokanai. As for the association of interests and occupations, quite naturally,

farmers and dairy farmers tend to have a strong interest in water quality, and people whose work

were associated with tourism tend to be strongly interested in landscape.

Finally, according to results of free answer, a majority of respondents answered 'the forest' when

asked a thing which they won't lose most strongly around Shumarinai-Lake. In addition, many

respondents hoped that the natural environment of the watershed would be preserved as it was, and

some expressed their hope that the watershed area should be more developed as a sightseeing area.

In summary, people's interest in the watershed is generally high. Among a variety of functions of

the watershed environment, a function of providing landscape has attracted people's interest most

strongly. Interests in function of habitat of the animals and plants and of water purification are

also very high. In addition, people with a deep interest in some aspect of the watershed tend to be

highly interested in the other aspect. These results will be utilized to develop a scenario

questionnaire of the project.

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