No abstract

Large-scale land abandonment and reconstruction activity has altered the ecosystem structure in the evacuation area for the Fukushima Daiichi power plant accident in 2011. Despite social concerns about changes in the avian assemblages that occurred after the accident, publicly accessible data are quite limited. We engaged in acoustic monitoring of birds using digital voice recorders from 2014 in and around the Fukushima evacuation zone. All monitoring sites were located within schoolyards (including those that had been converted to community centers) to examine the bird assemblages in the urban and rural landscapes that were heavily altered by land abandonment due to the nuclear plant accident. A digital voice recorder was installed at each monitoring site during May-July, and we recorded 20 min a day using timer-recording mode. We divided the audio data into 1-min segments and identified species occurred in sampled segments by experts. These data represent the presence-absence records from 52 sites monitored in 2014. In 2014, we identified the species for 7138 segments in total and 68 species occurred. We are continuing to monitor and intend to update the dataset with new observations hereafter. Our dataset will help people to recognize the status and dynamics of avian assemblage inside the evacuation zone, and will contribute to promote open science in avian ecological studies.

In 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant accident resulted in the evacuation of about 81,000 people from the evacuation zone, which suffered from high levels of radioactive contamination. Large-scale and long-term land abandonment can cause changes in species assemblages. Despite the extensive global attention this incident received, open and spatially-explicit datasets of mammal fauna from Fukushima remain quite limited. We established a continuous monitoring protocol using camera traps for mammals both inside and outside the evacuation zone; this paper presents our first dataset. These data represent the monitoring results from 45 camera traps from May 2014 to October 2014, including the location and actuation time of each camera, and the list of video records. After the publication of this initial data paper, we intend to continue monitoring until 2023 and the dataset will be hereafter updated with new observations.

No abstract

This data paper presents the vascular plant biodiversity sampled from four plots on Amami‐Oshima Island, three plots on Tokunoshima Island, and one plot on Okinawa Island within the natural World Heritage site, and an additional three plots in southern Kyushu using the standardized belt‐transect survey method during July 2012 to October 2020. The dataset includes 99 families, 215 genera, and 381 species of vascular plants, and provides species occurrence among 10 subplots for all vascular plants, girth at breast height (GBH) and height of all trees and climbers with GBH ≥ 3.2 cm or height ≥ 4 m in each 5 × 100 m plot. This dataset serves as baseline data for subsequent plant diversity monitoring of the natural World Heritage site. The Darwin Core Archive is deposited in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) through the Japan Initiative for Biodiversity Information, and are thus accessible through the GBIF portal under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The detailed Metadata for this abstract published in the Data Article section of the journal is available in MetaCat in JaLTER at http://db.cger.nies.go.jp/JaLTER/metacat/metacat/ERDP-2022-03.1/jalter-en.