The Preparing of Biotope Mapping in a Municipal Scale by Using Kamakura City as a Case Study

In this paper, the basic concepts and subjects of biotope mapping with an eye on the standard method establishment of the Japanese version were arranged by using Kamakura city as a case study. It was shown that the basis-strategies of biotope mapping are the previous determination of extraction units and the systematization of biotopes of an ecologically similar character. Because of the natural characteristic in Japan that a rural landscape had functioned as an important biotope, we extracted fundamentally every rural space as a biotope of ecological worth. As for the systematization we followed the German style higher lower rank classification and obtained five groups based on the present condition of Kamakura city as higher rank classes. Although a simultaneous preparation of a selective biotope mapping and a comprehensive one was made possible by display processing on GIS, the meanings of the extraction unit were different from each other. Following the procedure mentioned above, a biotope mapping (1 / 10,000) of the city level was prepared based on GIS environmental information maps. However, we considered that the standardization of biotope types and the description form for biotope lists, the positioning of some biotope types on the systematization of biotopes needed to be examined again.