We have developed a system that streams and archives live sound from remote areas across Japan via an unmanned automatic camera. The system was used to carry out pilot bird censuses in woodland; this allowed us to examine the use of live sound transmission and the role of social media as a mediator in remote scientific monitoring. The system has been streaming sounds 8 h per day for more than five years. We demonstrated that: (1) the transmission of live sound from a remote woodland could be used effectively to monitor birds in a remote location; (2) the simultaneous involvement of several participants via Internet Relay Chat to listen to live sound transmissions could enhance the accuracy of census data collection; and (3) interactions through Twitter allowed members of the public to engage or help with the remote monitoring of birds and experience inaccessible nature through the use of novel technologies.

The demand for urban construction has placed growing pressure on biodiversity conservation. In China, landscape fragmentation caused by rapid urbanization has resulted in an immense amount of damage to the ecological system. Taking the Haidian District of Beijing as the study area, this study distinguishes the vital patches and corridors for landscape connectivity maintenance through morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA), the probability of connectivity (PC), and the least-cost path analysis. Although we adopted and combined these methods from the existing research about landscape modeling, we went deeper into two parameters: the resistance value and the distance threshold. In order to get a species-specific result, we selected two focal species: the ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchius) and the raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), whose biological characteristics and habitat types are assumed to represent most of the habitats in Beijing. The result shows the different habitats and corridors for two species. Then, the results of two simulated scenarios are overlaid to obtain the final landscape pattern. Based on this case study, we propose a paradigm of ecological network identification of multiple species, which may contribute to landscape modeling and green space planning.

Many studies have reported that natural sounds (e.g., birdsong) are more restorative than urban noise. These studies have used physiological and psychological indicators, such as the skin conductance level (SCL) and the Perceived Restorativeness Scale (PRS), to evaluate the restorative effect of natural sounds. However, the effect of faint background noise mixed with birdsong on the restorativeness of birdsong has not been described yet. In the current experiment, we examined whether traffic noise affects the perceived restorativeness and the physiological restorativeness of birdsong in a low-stress condition using the SCL and the PRS. The scores of the PRS showed that birdsong significantly increased the perceived restorativeness of the place regardless of the car noise, but no significant difference was found between these two birdsongs. In contrast, physiologically, the birdsong without car noise decreased the participants’ SCL significantly more than the birdsong with car noise did. These results indicate that the SCL would be useful to detect the effect of background noise on natural sound when the noise is too low to affect the perceived restorativeness. This study highlights the importance of measuring the SCL besides assessing perceived restorativeness to describe the characteristics of restorative natural sound in future research.

Understanding how environmental changes driven by urbanization impact the biodiversity in urban riparian areas has great importance for landscape planning and river ecosystem conservation. There have been many studies on the response of bird communities to different environmental variables in urban parks; however, although supporting some of the highest bird diversities, case studies in urban riparian areas remain limited. In existing research, few studies have considered the impact of both local waterfront characteristics and surrounding environmental variables at a larger scale. In this study, we selected birds as the indicator to clarify their response to both local- and landscape-scale environmental variables in riparian areas of Tsing river, Beijing, in terms of (a) vegetation composition, (b) human disturbance, (c) land cover, and (d) landscape connectivity. We hypothesized that birds with different biological characteristics may respond differently to environmental variables. Birds were then further grouped according to the habitat type, residential type, and feeding type. It turned out that the coverage of grass and the disturbance of pedestrians are the most influential variables. Besides, compared with the land cover and landscape connectivity, the total contribution of vegetation characteristics and human disturbance accounts for the main proportion of explained variance. Information pertaining to these environmental variables can provide evidence to support bird conservation efforts in urban areas, and the identified distance threshold provides a basis for future landscape connectivity assessments.

Ecocentric education programs should include a method for the in-depth understanding of multi-scale ecological time concepts. To accomplish this, the common restriction that ecocentric education should pertain only to realistic nature may have to be removed. The purpose of this research was to confirm the validity of a program featuring phenology observation, employing fixed-point time-lapse images as climate change learning, and to obtain suggestions on the influence of the program on the multi-timescale concepts of the learners. An observation sheet listing images of cherry flowering from 16 April to 15 March each year from 1996 to 2017 was created, and the 50-min educational program using the observation sheet was conducted with 189 third year junior high school students. The tendencies among students’ answers to the two questions before and after the program suggest that the program contributed to the students acquiring the hundreds-year timescale concept based on the short-term timescale concept of dynamic nature. The contribution of this research is to visualize long-term and multi-scale ecological time concepts. By combining long-term time-lapse images with everyday nature experiences, the possibility of expanding such emotions as wonder and attachment to nature towards a long-term ecological timescale is achieved.

So far, evaluation of environmental learning has evaluated only single points in time; however, accumulated learning experiences should have greater effect on learning and on environmental problems. We investigate conceptions of learning and the accumulated educational experiences they reflect in the context of environmental education, which has a unique position in education systems. We developed and conducted a systematic survey in order to create a learning scale for environmental education conceptions; participants were Japanese high school students (N = 771). Analysis found that students’ conceptions of learning consist of six orientations: (1) Environmental Recognition/Conservation Responsibility Orientation, (2) Thought Expansion/Fulfillment, (3) Certainty/Applicability Orientation, (4) Teacher-Dependent Orientation, (5) Experience-Based Physical Activity Orientation, and (6) Duty-Adjusted Orientation. Factors (1), (2), and (5), above, are considered unique to environmental learning. Factor (1) reflects the societal content of environmental conservation, which is a criterion for evaluating environmental learning. In contrast, Factors (3), (4), and (6) are general educational factors mediated by elements such as academic achievement. The scale obtained from this research will help determine learners’ views of and degree of interest in environmental learning.