Abstract
Rice paddies function as wetlands; therefore, abandoned paddy fields cause a loss of habitats for aquatic species, such as amphibians. Following the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, paddy fields around the plant were abandoned and rapidly dried. To identify the impact of large-scale abandonment of paddy fields on the habitats of frogs, we investigated changes in the distributions of four frogs that breed in paddy fields using niche modeling and field surveys. The spatial distributions of suitable habitats before and after the accident for each frog were created using MaxEnt. In the area where rice cropping was restricted due to radioactive contamination, the areas of suitable habitats decreased for Pelophylax porosus porosus but increased or remained unchanged for other frogs after the accident. Additionally, field surveys conducted in 2014 indicated that the ratios of breeding sites in the area where rice cropping was restricted were significantly lower for P. p. porosus and Hyla japonica than outside this area. Thus, 3 years after the accident, one species strongly dependent upon paddy fields rapidly disappeared over a large area. Although amphibian populations or monitoring data were not available to examine changes directly after the accident in the study area, this research showed that the combination of niche modeling and field survey was effective for predicting species response after an accident and revealed that large-scale disasters sufficient to disrupt agricultural activity could markedly change the distribution of species reliant on habitats created by human activity.
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Acknowledgements
We express our gratitude to the Fukushima prefectural government for their permission to enter the evacuation area. We are also grateful to Drs. T. Hayashi, K. Fukasawa, A. Yoshioka, Y. Mishima, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. This study was financially supported by the Ministry of the Environment, Government of Japan, and in part by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant number JP16K16224).
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NM and TH conceived and designed the survey. NM, SI, OI and TH performed the survey. OI provided additional data. NM analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript; other authors provided editorial advice.
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Communicated by Raoul Van Damme.
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Matsushima, N., Ihara, S., Inaba, O. et al. Assessing the impact of large-scale farmland abandonment on the habitat distributions of frog species after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Oecologia 196, 1219–1232 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04991-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04991-y